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French Communists in Postwar Reconstruction

Immediately after liberation the French people were in a condition of exhaustion and demoralisation. The urgency and magnitude of the problems to be solved were so appalling that there was a general mood of apathy and despair.

The Communists did a great deal at this crucial time to put heart into the French workers. They gave a militant lead through the trade unions in carrying out emergency and salvage work, repairing railway lines, rolling tock, locomotives, bridges, roads and factories, restarting production in the mines and so forth.

From there they went straight on to becoming the driving force behind reconstruction. In the New York Herald Tribune in July 1946 Mr Joseph Alsop [he and his brother Stuart were two very prominent and in/famously right-wing journalists] gave his impressions of the situation in France, based on his own investigations on the spot.

French reconstruction, he explained, hinged on the Monnet plan, worked out by Jean Monnet (who was the first Deputy General Secretary of the League of Nations and in charge of its Economic, Financial, Transport and Health organisations). The plan provided for a council composed of commissions for each of the key sectors of the French economy, such as mining, steel and so forth. On these commissions representatives of workers, owners and the Government (without the owners in the case of nationalised industries) conferred on the best methods of modernising plant and technique in their sectors and estimated their requirements of manpower and new investment. Investment was to be planned on a large scale over a period of years and financed partly by credits secured abroad, such as France’s American loan, and by intensive exports.

‘The key to the success of this plan to date, which has been considerable’, writes Mr Alsop from Paris on July 12, 1946, is the enthusiastic collaboration of the French Communist Party. The Communists control the most important unions of the CGT, the great French confederation of labour unions. Communist leadership has been responsible for such surprising steps as acceptance by the key French unions, of a kind of modified piecework system by which a high output per worker is duly rewarded. Before initiating his plan, Jean Monnet discussed it with the leader of the French Communist Party, and especially with the shrewd Billou, Minister of Reconstruction, and obtained assurances of help…Reconstruction comes first, is the party line. Communist labour leaders sit on the more important planning commissions, and the manpower and mining commissions are actually provided by them.’

The next day Mr Alsop described how the ‘200 families’, that is the small closely knit French higher bourgeoisie who throughout the Third Republic ‘exercised a predominant, almost uninterrupted influence over the political life of France through their control of the banks, heavy industries and other sources of economic power have been replaced in the nationalised coal industry by ‘brisk, impressively intelligent French Communist labour leaders’. The Communists have replaced the ‘200 families’ in control of the coal and electrical industries, the former through the direct action of the Communist Miners’ Union immediately after liberation. They are also almost certain to control the electrical industry and have ‘infiltrated the new national administration of the banks and the old railroad administration’.They have eighty per cent control of the French TUC and dominate the ‘unions in mining, railways, steel and virtually all other heavy industries’. They have the largest women’s organisation in France, a big veterans’ organisation, and are receiving a heavy vote in country districts, besides controlling key posts in the Government ‘They have the most dynamic leaders in France…’
(From Zilliacus pp 192-193)

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