The pact signed on 10 December was a minimal text centred on Germany. Stalin secured no French support for the Oder-Neisse line within the treaty (though ultimately none of the western allies objected to it); de Gaulle won no Soviet backing for his German plans. Britain was left out, to no great regret on Churchill’s part.[342]France limited relations with the Lublin committee to an exchange of unofficial representatives to deal with practical issues, notably prisoners of war; but the identity of de Gaulle’s representative – Christian Fouchet, a trusted young Gaullist of 1940 pedigree – and the fact that the French, along with the British and Americans, effectively recognised the Lublin Committee as the government of Poland in August 1945, somewhat limits the real importance of France’s refusal to concede on this issue.

Pravda reported the meetings on 11 December in largely conventional terms, referring to ‘the many manifestations of sympathy, reinforced by the shared hardships of war, between the peoples of France and the Soviet Union’, and the talks between the French delegation, Stalin, and Molotov, on ‘the full range of problems relating to the continuation of the war and the organisation of the world’.[343]Of more interest are de Gaulle’s and Bidault’s official letters to Stalin, reproduced on 15 December. De Gaulle observed that the alliance would serve ‘to co-ordinate the military efforts of Russia and France with those of the United Nations with a view to safeguarding our two peoples from a similar catastrophe in the future’, while Bidault underlined the ‘close and permanent community of interests between our two countries’ which would ‘reinforce our will to win and guarantee peace in the future’.[344]In general, however, Pravda’s reports were relatively lowkey: while the outward events of the French visit were covered, there was no analysis of the treaty’s content, and little interruption to the paper’s staple diet of (victorious) war news, considered more important. Privately, Stalin told Averell Harriman, the American ambassador to Moscow, that he had found de Gaulle ‘awkward and stubborn’, as well as unrealistic in his aims for Germany.[345]French coverage, by contrast, was altogether more fulsome. The treaty dominated the first-ever issue of Le Monde, whose editorialist observed that ‘barely a few months after her liberation, France’s co-operation has been sought out by one of the clearest victors of the war’, that the alliance was ‘a further proof of the skill and far– sightedness of the head of the Provisional Government’, and that it would no doubt pave the way for a tripartite pact with Britain.[346]What neither side mentioned, finally, was the stake of the alliance for French internal politics. For the Soviets, it would enhance the status of the PCF; for de Gaulle, it would help keep the same party in check.

The Stalin-Thorez conversations

De Gaulle’s BBC broadcast of 6 June 1944, inviting the French to ‘fight the enemy with all the means at their disposal’ in the wake of the D-day landings, was echoed by a call to ‘national insurrection’ from the PCF’s Central Committee. In a few days the overall number of partisan units, grouped under the umbrella of the Forces Françaises de l’Intérieur (FFI), multiplied several times over, reaching nearly half a million men, very many of them Communists. Militarily, the results of the insurrection varied from the tragic (premature risings, provoking ferocious reprisals, in Tulle and other provincial towns) to the dashing and successful (in Lille, Marseilles, Limoges, Thiers and above all Paris). It remained to be seen which authority the FFI would recognise. Officially, the answer was clear: since April 1944, two Communists had sat on the CFLN and then the GPRF, as part of a unified Resistance movement headed by de Gaulle (who gave a ministry to Charles Tillon, commander of the main Communist Francs-Tireurs et Partisans, on 9 September). Officially again, from 9 June the FFI were under the command of the French army, and de Gaulle ordered the dissolution of their senior command structure on 28 August. On the ground, things were less simple. The FFI sought to maintain their autonomy from the regular army, while the comités de libération, often drawn from their ranks, disputed control over localities with the prefects and special commissioners appointed by the GPRF: hence de Gaulle’s extensive provincial tours in autumn 1944, aimed at reinforcing the GPRF’s authority across France.[347]

These two competing authorities could not coexist for long. On 28 October de Gaulle ordered, by a decree of the GPRF, the disarmament and dissolution of all armed groups other than the army and the police. The two Communist ministers accepted the decree; criticism of it within the PCF was initially muted; but the Conseil National de la Résistance (CNR), dominated by Communists, attacked it. So did many of the militias directly concerned, with growing support from the PCF press. The Communist leadership, indeed, talked as if it was preparing a revolution: on 15 November Jacques Duclos, the party’s acting leader in the absence of its secretary-general Maurice Thorez, called for the summoning of ‘estates general’ (a reference to 1789), locally and then nationally, for the exercise of local power by ‘elected and not appointed bodles’, and for a regime in which the people’s representatives could ‘be dis– missed at any moment’.[348]De Gaulle’s decree remained ‘a dead letter’ a month after its promulgation.[349]But the logical corollary of this – a full insurrection against the GPRF – never took place. De Gaulle, supported by the majority of the population, and on the Left by the Socialists of the SFIO (Section Française de l’Internationale Ouvrière), was obviously disinclined to play the role of Kerensky. Tens of thousands of Allied troops remained in France. And no instructions for a rising had come from Moscow, either from the Kremlin or from Thorez.

Thorez had deserted