The plans produced by his Commission, the
Commissariat Général du Plan, were not direc-
tives, but targets and guides showing how the dif-
ferent elements of the economy could best be
coordinated in order to achieve the proposed
increases in production. Monnet had no intention
of controlling industry as was done in communist
countries. Much depended on his personal influ-
ence. The nationalised industries provided a good
starting point because they were more amenable
to government planning, and Monnet’s Plan dealt
primarily with improving supplies of fuel and
energy, as well as with oil refineries, transport,
steel, cement and tractors to increase agricultural
productivity. The aim of the Plan was to raise
industrial and agricultural output by 25 per cent
over 1929 within three years. This would make
possible a substantial rise in the standard of living.
It was presented as an emergency plan of action.
Instead it was to become a much more perma-
nent institution with a series of five-year plans.
The remarkable success of continuous economic
planning based on long-term objectives con-
trasted with what appeared to be the hopelessly
inefficient political scenario so characteristic of
France. This political instability led many to
underrate France’s fundamental strength.
In world affairs, France had not won an equal
place with Britain in 1945. France’s German pol-
icy of attempting to detach the Rhineland and the
Ruhr achieved no success. The US and Britain
were coordinating and centralising Western
Germany, isolating France in its German occupa-
tion zone. De Gaulle’s cherished hope of estab-
lishing France as a third force and as a bridge
between the Anglo-Saxons and the Russians,
which had led him to Moscow and to the conclu-
sion of a new treaty between France and the Soviet
Union in 1944, was an idle dream. Stalin had no
intention of using de Gaulle as an intermediary,
and the realities of the Cold War destroyed any
notions of French bridge-building. In reasserting
French colonial rights by the use of force in
Madagascar, the Middle East, Algeria and Indo-
China, France enmeshed itself in Third World
struggles for independence which, for more than
two decades, caused many deaths, bled France of
resources and weakened it at home and abroad,
only to end in failure. Finally, 1947 was a year of
economic crisis and industrial unrest. Yet in retro-
spect, it was those very failures and difficulties that
turned French thoughts in new directions.
French economic recovery was not possible
without German economic recovery and Franco-
German cooperation. De Gaulle was the first
French statesman to offer the German people rec-
onciliation but it was on condition that they
became junior partners and accepted a weakened
German state deprived not only of the Saar but
also of the Rhineland and Ruhr, which would be
internationalised and formed into a separate
‘European’ state. But such aims were as much
opposed by the US and Britain as they were by
Germany. As conflicts with the Soviet Union
deepened, so earlier anxieties receded. Germany
was likely to remain divided between the West
and the Soviet Union; control over armaments
and the Ruhr would continue in any case. But
West German support would have to be won: this
meant concessions and no further amputations of
German territory.
For the governments of the French Fourth
Republic it was, therefore, not so much a per-
ceived directRussian threat, the fear that Soviet
tanks would cross the Elbe and head for France,
that provided the impetus for a change of policy;
rather, it was the realisation that French aims in
continental Europe – dominance over Germany,
bridge-building to the east and maintenance of
French independence in the face of the Atlantic
Anglo-Saxon powers – were doomed to failure as
an indirect consequence of the Cold War. France
itself was now threatened with isolation as Britain
and the US chose to start building up West
Germany. France might, nevertheless, have taken
its time to change course had it not been for its
dire economic condition, which obliged the gov-
ernment to rely on American aid.
Internally and externally in 1947 pressures were
thus mounting for a reorientation of French poli-
cies. There was soon tangible evidence that a new
course was being followed. An Anglo-French
treaty of alliance was concluded in March 1947
(the Treaty of Dunkirk) to reassure France as
Germany revived, and as a first step towards closer
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