The question of Spain was a complex one in the aftermath of the Second World War. General Francisco Franco’s regime had come to power in the Spanish Civil War with the aid of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. Although not a belligerent during the war, Franco demonstrated pro-Axis tendencies. What role could such a state, one that maintained vestiges of fascism in its Falange party, play in the emerging postwar international order? While the question troubled many countries on the Allied side, perhaps it was most difficult for the French. Emerging from Vichy’s collaborationist past in late 1944, many in France saw the need to free Spain from Franco just as France had been liberated from German and Vichy rule. The Resistance newspaper Combat reminded its readers that the war had really begun in Spain, in 1936, and thus had to end there as well. 12 Yet France too was, in the words of Georges-Henri Soutou, ‘deeply committed’ to the Cold War conflict and the emerging Western Alliance. 13 Moreover, as has been shown by William Hitchcock, France played an important role in shaping alliance policies in Europe, especially with regard to the question of Germany’s future. 14 Would the domestic desire for an aggressive anti-Franco policy contribute to divisions within the alliance? Or on the periphery of Europe, could France too shape alliance politics in a profound way? This paper will examine the apparent rupture in Franco-American relations over Spain that occurred in 1946 in order to assess the importance of the alliance to French foreign policy.

The question of French relations with Franco in Spain engaged those from the Resistance and in the movements of the French Left immediately following Liberation. These groups and individuals were successful in their effort to make the question of relations with Spain an issue of considerable public concern over the next four years. The most significant government policy to emerge from that debate was the decision by the French Government in 1946 to impose economic sanctions on Spain through the closure of their common Pyrenean border to all commercial traffic. France was the only western state to move beyond a policy of moral condemnation of Franco and take such action against Spain in the aftermath of the Second World War. This action was preceded and followed by intense efforts to convince the United States and Great Britain to join in this sanctioning of Franco’s Spain. Indeed, France sought American support for their policy both in private, within the alliance, and publicly, in the forum of the United Nations. When the U.S. Government, along with the British, refused to sanction the Franco regime, it seemed as if French idealism and morality had been thwarted by a new sense of ‘realism’ that would shape much of the Cold War.

The reality, however, was that French policy-makers were reluctant, at every stage, to challenge the alliance on the Spanish question. When the definition of French interests and the ability to coordinate policy with the United States and Great Britain proved difficult, primarily due to domestic politics, France’s Foreign Ministry became a reluctantly uncooperative partner with the other two western allies. Rather than a sign of France’s independence, then, or of the Left’s influence over foreign policy making in the early years of the Fourth Republic, the division with the United States over Spain was a moment where France was unable to shape alliance politics, where French weaknesses could not be exploited for gain, and where to the dismay of Foreign Ministry officials, France was isolated from its allies. This preference for an alliance solution, despite the intensity of domestic pressure and even in the face of policy failure, underlines the commitment to the Western alliance that shaped Fourth Republic foreign policy across Europe.

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12 Combat, 7 September 1944.
13 Georges-Henri Soutou, ‘France and the Cold War 1944-63’ Diplomacy and Statecraft 12:4 (2001) 35.
14 William I. Hitchcock. France Restored: Cold War Diplomacy and the Quest for Leadership in Europe, 1944-1954 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998).