and by the tactics of de Gaulle, who had re-entered
active politics in 1947. Those on the right, discon-
tented with the workings of the Fourth Republic,
from de Gaulle’s Rassemblement to various con-
servative groupings, polled 26 per cent in 1951,
and later with the popular Poujadists in the 1956
elections gained 32 per cent. Thus coalition gov-
ernments were threatened by the prospect of dis-
agreement among the partners.
If we add to this political instability the con-
servative structure of the greater part of French
industry, dominated by small enterprises and
widely dispersed – in 1956 there were still
499,000 industrial plants, each employing an
average of eleven workers – a backward agricul-
ture, much of it split into uneconomic small
farms, as well as a much higher rate of inflation
than that of its industrial rivals, the total picture
is bleak.
Armed resistance to the threatened loss of
empire after 1945 greatly increased France’s
burdens in the first difficult post-war decade. De
Gaulle was not the first French leader to attempt
to compensate for the humiliation of defeat by
reasserting France’s grandeur overseas. Even the
French communist leader Maurice Thorez sup-
ported the French army against the communist
Vietnamese independence movement, declaring
that he ‘did not intend to liquidate the French
position in Indo-China’. Their unsuccessful war
in Indo-China, from its start in December 1946
until the armistice agreed in Geneva in July 1954,
debilitated the French, costing them more than
they had received in Marshall Aid; 10 per cent of
the national budget had been swallowed up by it
and 75,000 officers and men had lost their lives.
Meanwhile, in North Africa, the French were
facing serious conflict in their protectorates of
Tunisia and Morocco. Here, too, they had
refused to bow to nationalist demands until ter-
rorism and resistance wore down their will to
maintain their rule. Independence was granted to
Morocco and Tunisia in 1956. The withdrawals
from these two North African countries had
another cause. A French presence there was
regarded as secondary to continued French rule
in Algeria: for Algeria was not a protectorate, it
was ‘France’. The savage conflict, which began in
1954 and was to last for eight years, finally broke
the Fourth Republic and brought back de Gaulle.
In the summer of 1958 France came close to civil
strife and the politicians, in despair, gave way to
de Gaulle’s Fifth Republic.
This catalogue of disasters and burdens is,
however, only one side of the history of the
Fourth Republic. Behind the unstable political
façade, the Fourth Republic inaugurated an
industrial revolution by a remarkable combination
of state encouragement, central planning and
private enterprise. From 1944 to 1947 the state
had acquired considerable economic power,
having brought into public ownership and
control the Renault motor works, Air France, the
Bank of France and the larger private banks,
insurance, gas, electricity and the coal-mining
industry. Although the departure of the commu-
nists from government and the decline of the
socialists halted the expansion of state ownership,
there was no denationalisation, and what had
been nationalised was vigorously developed. The
results of the modernisation of agriculture were
patchy and less spectacular; nevertheless over a
decade and a half some real progress was
achieved. The new concept of modernisation was
typified by Jean Monnet, one of France’s most
distinguished public servants.
Monnet had persuaded de Gaulle after the war
to allow him to organise a group of experts to
prepare a plan for the recovery and modernisation
of France. The first Five-Year Plan was approved
in January 1947. It placed Monnet at the head of
a small secretariat in the modest offices of the
Commissariat du Plan de Modernisation et
d’Équipment, charged with promoting the reali-
sation of its objectives. The Plan indicated growth
targets for specific sectors of the economy; mod-
ernisation commissions were set up for each
sector at which the details of how this growth
could be achieved were worked out with indus-
trialists, civil servants and the unions, with the
assistance of members of Monnet’s secretariat.
Monnet’s Plan bears little resemblance to Soviet
five-year plans, with their detailed targets and
directives. In place of the stifling bureaucracy and
rigid, inefficient central planning of the USSR,
1
THE FRENCH FOURTH REPUBLIC 515
