When the Americans Wanted to Govern France

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The USA had planned to impose on France a protectorate status, governed by an Allied Military Government of Occupied Territories (AMGOT).

This article is available in French.
This is the full version of the article in French from « Le Monde Diplomatique »
Quand les Américains voulaient gouverner la France.

This is a little-known page of World War II history: as early as 1941-1942, Washington planned to impose on France — as on the future vanquished, Italy, Germany, and Japan — a status of protectorate, governed by an Allied Military Government of Occupied Territories (AMGOT). This American military government of occupied territories would have abolished all sovereignty, including the right to mint currency, following the model provided by the Darlan-Clark agreements of November 1942.

According to some American historians, this project was rooted in Franklin D. Roosevelt’s hatred for Charles de Gaulle, the “would-be dictator” whom he wanted to spare post-PĂ©tain France. This thesis of an American president concerned with establishing universal democracy is appealing, but incorrect[1].

🔗A “Vichy Without Vichy”

At the time, the United States mainly feared that France, although weakened by the defeat of June 1940, would oppose their views on two points, at least if de Gaulle, who claimed to restore her sovereignty, led her. On one hand, having resisted after 1918-1919 against Washington’s German policy, Paris would use its potential power of nuisance to hinder it again. On the other hand, France would be reluctant to relinquish its empire, rich in raw materials and strategic bases, while the Americans had, since 1899, demanded — for their goods and capital — the benefit of the “open door” in all colonial empires[2].

That is why the United States both vetoed de Gaulle, especially when his name helped unify the Resistance, and showed a certain leniency mixed with strictness towards Vichy. Like the Latin American regimes dear to Washington, this despised regime was, in their eyes, more pliable than a government with strong popular support.

Thus progressed an American “Vichy without Vichy,” which, in its various forms, was supported by French elites clinging to the State that had restored privileges diminished by the “old” republican regime and eager to negotiate a smooth transition from the German era to the pax americana.

Since December 1940, even before entering the war (December 1941), the United States had been preparing their landing in Morocco and Algeria with Robert Murphy, President Roosevelt’s special representative in North Africa and future chief adviser to the military governor of the American occupation zone in Germany — a nemesis of the Gaullists. They attempted a rallying around a symbol of defeat, General Maxime Weygand, Vichy’s general delegate for Africa until November 1941.

When that failed, just before their landing on November 8, 1942, they turned to General Henri Giraud. Next came Admiral François Darlan, then in Algiers: this champion of state collaboration at the head of the Vichy government from February 1941 to April 1942 had remained with PĂ©tain after Pierre Laval’s return to power[3].

On November 22, 1942, American General Mark W. Clark had the “turned” admiral sign “a singular agreement” putting “North Africa at the disposal of the Americans” and making France “a vassal country subject to ‘capitulations.’” The Americans “appropriated exorbitant rights” over the “territorial extension of France”: movement of French troops, control and command of ports, airfields, fortifications, arsenals, telecommunications, merchant navy; freedom for requisitions; tax exemption; right of extraterritoriality; “administration of military zones defined by them”; some activities would be entrusted to “joint commissions” (maintenance of order, day-to-day administration, economy, and censorship)[4].

Laval himself was preparing his American future while proclaiming his “wish for Germany’s victory” (June 22, 1942): assisted by his son-in-law, RenĂ© de Chambrun, a collaborationist business lawyer with both American and French nationality, he believed himself promised by Washington to an eminent role after a “separate” German-Anglo-American peace against the Soviets[5]. But supporting Laval was as incompatible with the domestic balance of power as the so-called “peace” was with the Red Army’s contribution to crushing the Wehrmacht.

🔗A “Fine and Good Alliance”

After Darlan’s assassination on December 24, 1942, in which the Gaullists were involved, Washington returned to Giraud, fleetingly De Gaulle’s number two at the French Committee of National Liberation (CFLN) founded on June 3, 1943. The Vichy general was joined, especially after Stalingrad, by senior officials (such as Maurice Couve de Murville, Vichy’s director of external finances and exchange) and industrialists (like former Cagoulard Lemaigre-Dubreuil, of Lesieur oils and Printemps, who had played both the German and American sides since 1941) and collaborating bankers (such as Alfred Pose, general manager of the Banque nationale pour le commerce et l’industrie, loyal to Darlan).

It was this American option that Pierre Pucheu embodied when he joined Algiers and Giraud: what a symbol of maintaining Vichy than this minister of industrial production, then of the interior under Darlan, delegate of Worms bank and the ComitĂ© des Forges, former leader and funder of Jacques Doriot’s French Popular Party, champion of economic collaboration and anti-communist repression in the service of the occupier (designation of ChĂąteaubriant hostages, creation of special courts, etc.).

Abandoned by Giraud and imprisoned in May 1943, he was tried, sentenced to death, and executed in Algiers in March 1944. Not only to please the communists, whom Pucheu had persecuted: De Gaulle thus sent a warning to the United States and Great Britain. It sowed panic among those who expected American salvation to follow the “German shield”: “The French bourgeois,” mocked a police officer in February 1943, “[has] always considered the American or British soldier as being at his service in case of a Bolshevik victory”[6].

Painting De Gaulle as both a right-wing dictator and a puppet of the French Communist Party and the USSR, Washington nevertheless had to give up imposing the dollar in the “liberated territories” and (with London) recognize, on October 23, 1944, his Provisional Government of the French Republic: two and a half years after the Soviet recognition of the “government of the real France,” a year and a half after the immediate recognition of the CFLN, two months after the liberation of Paris and shortly before De Gaulle signed with Moscow, on December 10, to counterbalance American hegemony, a “treaty of alliance and mutual assistance” which he described as a “fine and good alliance”[7].

Excluded from Yalta in February 1945, dependent on the United States, France was fully integrated into their sphere of influence. However, the vigor of its internal and external resistance had spared it from their protectorate.

Annie Lacroix-Riz Professor of contemporary history, University of Paris VII.

  1. Costigliola Frank, France and the United States. The Cold Alliance since World War II, Twayne Publishers, New York, 1992. ↩

  2. William A. Williams, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, Dell Publishing, New York, 1972 (first edition, 1959). ↩

  3. Robert O. Paxton, Vichy France, Seuil, Paris, 1974. ↩

  4. Jean-Baptiste Duroselle, L’AbĂźme, 1939-1945, Imprimerie nationale, Paris, 1982, and Annie Lacroix-Riz, Industriels et banquiers français sous l’Occupation, Armand Colin, Paris, 1999. ↩

  5. Leitmotiv since 1942 of Pierre Nicolle, Typed Journal, 1940-1944, PJ 39 (High Court of Justice), police prefecture archives, clearer than the truncated printed version, Cinquante mois d’armistice, AndrĂ© Bonne, Paris, 1947, 2 vols. ↩

  6. Letter no. 740 from the police commissioner to the prefect of Melun, February 13, 1943, F7 14904, National Archives; see Richard Vinen, The politics of French business, 1936-1945, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1991. ↩

  7. Note from the Deputy Director of Political Affairs, Paris, October 25, 1944, and treaty in eight articles Europe-USSR, 1944-1948, vol. 51, Foreign Affairs Ministry archives. ↩