The recognition of de Gaulle's government

On 23 October 1944 the United States, Great Britain and the Soviet Union – and with them Canada – formally recognised the administration led by General Charles de Gaulle as the Provisional Government of the French Republic. At 5 p.m. Paris time (noon in Washington) the representatives of the four countries called together on the French foreign minister, Georges Bidault, and handed him notes of recognition. At the same time their missions in Paris became embassies. This ended the dispute, running since 1940, over whether de Gaulle and his followers represented France or merely one of its political camps.

Popular chronologies say that on this day the Allies “recognised General de Gaulle as head of the provisional government of France”. This needs a small qualification. The recognition concerned not the general in person but the government: according to the State Department’s announcement, the United States recognised “the de facto French authority established in Paris under the leadership of General de Gaulle” as the Provisional Government of the French Republic. The government itself had existed under that name since 3 June 1944; what was new was that the great Allies accepted the name for the first time and established normal diplomatic relations with it.

The long road to recognition

The dispute over recognition had a long history. From 1940 Britain treated de Gaulle as the leader of the Free French, but not as the head of a government. When the French Committee of National Liberation was set up in Algiers in 1943, London and Washington recognised it only in a limited form – as the body administering the overseas territories that answered to it. The Soviet Union went further at the time and recognised the committee as the representative of the state interests of the French Republic. The committee’s renaming as the provisional government in June 1944 did not change the position of any of the powers.

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt held out longest. Most historians agree that he distrusted de Gaulle, regarded him as a politician with dictatorial ambitions and did not want the Allies to “impose” a government on the French before they had expressed their will in free elections. Washington prepared arrangements for liberated France modelled on the Allied military government in Italy (AMGOT), which de Gaulle had no intention of accepting. Practice soon overtook these plans, however. After the Normandy landings, de Gaulle’s commissioners and prefects took over power in the liberated departments, and after the liberation of Paris in August the government moved from Algiers to the capital. On 11 July Roosevelt agreed to recognise the committee as the de facto authority entitled to administer France, and on 25 August a civil affairs agreement between the Allied supreme command and the French authorities came into force. It divided France into a forward zone, where the military command had the final say, and an interior zone administered entirely by the French.

In September 1944 de Gaulle reshaped his cabinet into a government of national unity, which brought in leaders of the internal Resistance and representatives of parties from the Communists to the moderate right. This government was accepted by the overwhelming majority of the French, and the Allied armies worked with it every day. Formal recognition, however, was still lacking.

September and October: Roosevelt’s conditions

As early as 17 September 1944 Secretary of State Cordell Hull wrote to the President that the time had come to give serious consideration to recognising the French authorities as the provisional government. He argued that de Gaulle had been accepted by the French as their national leader for the transitional period, as reports from American officers confirmed, and that the Resistance and the political parties would not allow a personal dictatorship. Recognition, he added, would also free the United States from the charge of imposing the general on the French. On 19 September, however, Roosevelt replied that he and Prime Minister Winston Churchill had decided to wait for the time being; the two leaders had discussed the matter at the Second Quebec Conference. Hull feared that the British would present the Americans to the French as the only opponents of recognition, and on 3 October he again drew the President’s attention to the matter.

The British government had long been inclined to recognise de Gaulle, although Churchill, with many years of difficult relations with the general behind him, did not want to act against Roosevelt. He told the House of Commons that recognition should be preceded by the transformation of the Consultative Assembly into a body more representative of the whole country. On 14 October, while in Moscow for talks with Stalin at the Moscow Conference, Churchill proposed to the President that de Gaulle’s government be recognised either once the enlarged assembly had met and given the government a vote of confidence, or – which he himself thought preferable – as soon as a French interior zone had been formally established. He stressed that the French were cooperating with the Allied supreme command and that their government had the support of the majority of the nation.

Both conditions were quickly being met. By an ordinance of 11 October 1944 the provisional government reorganised the Provisional Consultative Assembly, which had been sitting in Algiers since November 1943. Since elections could not be held in a devastated and still partly occupied country, the original plan of confirming mandates by a vote in the liberated departments was dropped, and delegates of the Resistance and of the former parliamentary groups were co-opted instead. The assembly’s membership was set at 248. At the same time the Allied supreme command was negotiating with the French the handover of the greater part of the country as an interior zone.

On 19 October Roosevelt wrote back to Churchill that nothing should be done until the French had set up a “real interior zone”, and that recognition must depend on both changes actually being carried out – an announcement by de Gaulle would not be enough. He also stipulated that recognition must not automatically mean a seat for France on the European Advisory Commission. That same evening Hull informed the American representative in Paris, Jefferson Caffery, that the President had decided to recognise the provisional government as soon as the French announced the creation of the interior zone, and that the British would do the same.

The military also favoured early recognition. On 20 October General Dwight Eisenhower told Caffery that, in reply to a question from the Combined Chiefs of Staff, he was recommending prompt recognition of de Gaulle’s government. He justified this by the army’s interests: the Allied armies needed a strong and recognised French authority in their rear. With winter approaching, communications wrecked and the front’s needs enormous, the Allies were unable to meet the needs of the civilian population – Eisenhower calculated that only a third of the coal the Germans had allocated could be released for civilian purposes. Without recognition of the government, he believed, the forces of “disorder” might exploit the situation to undermine the authority of the state.

23 October

On 20 October Roosevelt informed Joseph Stalin by personal letter that the United States intended to recognise the French authorities as the provisional government as soon as an interior zone under French administration had been established. He noted that the recent enlargement of the Consultative Assembly had made those authorities more representative, and gave Stalin advance notice in case he wished to act likewise. Moscow, which in 1943 had already gone further than the Western powers in recognising the Algiers committee, joined in the decision.

The French announced the creation of the interior zone sooner than Washington had expected, so the State Department – where Hull was at the time being replaced by the Acting Secretary of State, Edward Stettinius – set the announcement of recognition for noon on Monday 23 October, simultaneously in Washington and London. Under the agreement between the supreme command and the French authorities, the greater part of France, including Paris, passed from the forward zone into the interior zone. The British note stated that the administration of this area, and responsibility for it, now lay with the central French authorities, which “in fact exercise governmental authority” there, and that this circumstance made it fitting to recognise them as the provisional government. The American note welcomed the agreement to hand the French “full responsibility for governing the greater part of France”.

On the morning of 23 October the British representative in Paris, Duff Cooper, informally warned Bidault that recognition was a matter of hours. That same morning the Soviet representative, Alexander Bogomolov (PL), received instructions from Moscow to follow the American and British lead. According to Caffery’s dispatch, Duff Cooper wanted to call on Bidault together with the Soviet and Canadian representatives to demonstrate a “united front”; the American refused to allow a visit without him, and in the end the four diplomats – Caffery, Duff Cooper, Bogomolov and the Canadian Georges Vanier – arrived together at 5 p.m. They handed Bidault the notes of recognition and announced that their missions would be raised to the rank of embassies. Bidault, Caffery reported, was deeply moved. He replied that what mattered most was the continued prosecution of the war, and expressed the hope that France would play an ever greater part in it. He also declared that the French government recognised them as ambassadors and that no further formalities were needed. Following the great powers, other states then announced their recognition.

De Gaulle received the recognition with the reserve he maintained towards the Allies throughout the war. At a press conference on 25 October, asked about the powers’ decision, he replied, according to a widely quoted account, that the French government was satisfied that “it has been agreed to call it by its name”. As he saw it, the Allies were giving France nothing new, but belatedly taking note of a state of affairs that the French had created themselves – from Bayeux to Paris.

Place in the history of the war

The recognition of 23 October 1944 closed the period in which the future of power in France could still depend on the Allies’ decisions. From then on, de Gaulle’s government was a full partner for the great powers, and not merely a “de facto authority” with which they cooperated out of necessity. Recognition did not, however, settle France’s place among the victors – Roosevelt clearly kept it separate from the question of French participation in decisions on post-war Germany – and de Gaulle had to fight for that in the months that followed.

Events moved quickly. On 7 November the enlarged Consultative Assembly held its first session in Paris. On 11 November, the anniversary of the 1918 armistice, Churchill and Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden came to Paris and walked down the Champs-Élysées with de Gaulle. In those days France was invited to join the European Advisory Commission, which was drawing up the principles for the occupation of Germany. In December de Gaulle and Bidault travelled to Moscow, where on 10 December they signed the Franco-Soviet Treaty of Alliance and Mutual Assistance – the provisional government’s first treaty of alliance with one of the great powers. The Moscow talks also brought the first dispute over Poland: Stalin pressed France to recognise the Polish Committee of National Liberation, which de Gaulle refused, agreeing only to an exchange of unofficial representatives.

France was not invited to the Yalta Conference in February 1945, but the three leaders granted it an occupation zone in Germany and a seat on the Allied Control Council. In June 1945 France became one of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council. The provisional government recognised on 23 October governed the country until 1946, when the constitution of the Fourth Republic was adopted. De Gaulle had already stepped down as chairman of the government in January 1946, in a dispute with the parties over the shape of the new system.