Play as · Cold War 1947 · L4 · Fourth Republic

France - 1947

France in 1947 is rebuilding a great-power identity on ground that keeps shifting under it. Liberated three years ago, it has recovered its seat among the victors - a permanent place on the Security Council, a zone of occupation in Germany, a global empire - but the nation underneath is divided, impoverished and politically volatile. The Fourth Republic, its constitution barely a year old, governs through fragile multiparty coalitions in which the Communist Party, the largest in the country and fresh from a heroic Resistance record, sits in government until the spring. Bread is still rationed, the franc is weak, and the reconstruction financed by the Monnet Plan is a race against hunger and strikes. Abroad, the empire that France counts as the guarantee of its rank is already in revolt. The strategic identity is the recovering great power caught in a vice: between a Germany it fears and needs to contain, a domestic left it can no longer keep in the tent, and colonial wars that will drain it for a generation.

Starting position

The starting board is instability on every front. In May the Communist ministers are expelled from the government, ending tripartisme and opening a period of waves of strikes that shake the young Republic and raise the fear of insurrection. The economy is fragile - inflation, shortages, a currency the Americans watch nervously - and the Marshall Plan offered in June becomes a lifeline the government reaches for, binding France more firmly to the Western camp. In Germany, France pursues its own hard line - it wants the Ruhr and the Saar detached or controlled, and resists the Anglo-American drive toward a unified western German state - even as the logic of the Cold War pushes it toward accepting a rebuilt Germany as a partner against the East. And the empire is burning: the war in Indochina against the Viet Minh has been running since 1946, and in 1947 a major uprising in Madagascar is being suppressed with great bloodshed. France holds a seat at the top table and cannot keep order in its own coalition or its own colonies.

What turns the campaign

What France wants is to be a first-rank power again - secure against Germany, weighty in the Western alliance, master of a global empire, and stable enough at home to sustain all three. The obstacles are that these goals collide. Containing Germany pulls against the American plan to rebuild it; holding the empire pulls against the cost and the manpower and the country's own republican ideals; and keeping the Republic stable pulls against a political system that manufactures short-lived governments and a communist opposition that can paralyse the economy at will. The levers are the American alliance and Marshall aid, which buy recovery at the price of alignment; the occupation of Germany, which gives France a voice in the German settlement; and the empire, counted as prestige and as burden in the same ledger. The fears are a resurgent Germany, a communist France, and imperial collapse. The campaign turns on whether France can hold its coalitions together long enough to convert Marshall dollars and a German settlement into durable security - or is pulled apart by the strikes at home and the wars abroad.

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