3 - Restoration

Summary

This chapter shifts the view from the metropole to overseas France. It shows how French officials focused on restoring their empire in the immediate postwar era. The empire was crucial to France’s quest to regain its status as a Great Power; it was also a salve for domestic unrest. The empire provided raw materials and markets crucial to recovery; it also gave a struggling French government a luster of strength. Agitation in North Africa and Indochina threatened to undermine this enterprise. As in the metropole, French officials abroad sought to outmaneuver and delegitimize rivals who threatened their authority through their contacts with U.S. intelligence. They began to tie nationalist agitation in North Africa and Indochina to local communist action and PCF activity inside France. In North Africa, they also traced an apparent evolution in local communist rhetoric from criticism of nationalist activity, to collusion aiming for electoral gains, to support for independence by the end of 1945. And in Indochina, French officials employed the same methods used to discredit de Gaulle’s government in 1944 and 1945. In the months after the war, it also became a crucial component of the basic formula they used to influence American policy.