Echoing other analysts, New York Times opinion columnist Thomas L. Friedman wrote: “What happened in the Oval Office on Friday…was something that had never happened in the nearly 250-year history of this country: In a major war in Europe, our president clearly sided with the aggressor, the dictator and the invader against the democrat, the freedom fighter and the invaded.”
The public display in the Oval Office was unprecedented and bizarre. “But there’s nothing unique about an American president disrespecting and distancing himself from a close European ally suffering a brutal invasion and years-long occupation during ‘a major war in Europe.’”
My senior thesis advisor at Columbia University, where I was a history major, was Robert O. Paxton, a leading expert on European fascism and the collaborationist government of Vichy France. Paxton suggested that I explore America’s plans to treat France after D-Day not as a liberated country but as a defeated enemy, receiving the same status (“Allied Military Government of Occupied Territories,” or AMGOT) as Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy.
What I uncovered from my research at the FDR Presidential Library and the National Archives was an obscure and fascinating episode in the history of World War II.
There are startling parallels between the way that President Trump dressed down Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and how President Franklin Delano Roosevelt showered General Charles De Gaulle of France with contempt and opprobrium.
Roosevelt had long believed that France was unstable and unreliable. France’s quick defeat in six weeks in 1940, followed by its signing an armistice with Germany, territorial partition and establishment of a collaborationist puppet state in the southern spa city of Vichy confirmed his worst views of the country as weak and louche. After the war, FDR decided, the U.S. would seize France’s vast colonial empire. France would certainly not revert to its prewar status as a “great power.”
Representing the opposing view was General De Gaulle, who rejected entreaties to join Vichy. Instead, he fled to London after the fall of France. There he formed the Free French and took to BBC radio to urge Frenchmen to join him in England with a view toward someday reconquering their homeland alongside the Allies. Conservative, a devout Catholic and fiercely nationalistic, De Gaulle dedicated himself to restoring France’s greatness and wiping away the humiliation of defeat and collaboration. De Gaulle toured and raised funds across the United States, where he was popular with the press and a public sympathetic to French suffering under Nazi and Vichy rule.
A clash between these two personalities was inevitable.
Roosevelt viewed De Gaulle as an ingrate and illegitimate colonialist who didn’t deserve support. British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, who admired De Gaulle’s patriotism and whose government provided material support to the Free French, vainly tried to steer a middle course, asking Roosevelt to recognize the Free French as a government in exile and De Gaulle as de facto head of state after liberation. Instead, the Roosevelt Administration maintained full diplomatic relations with the Vichy regime until Vichy Prime Minister Pierre Laval severed them in late 1942.
If not De Gaulle, Churchill asked, who would govern France after the Germans were vanquished? FDR didn’t have an answer. But he knew who he didn’t support. Perhaps like Trump vis-à-vis Zelensky, Roosevelt viewed De Gaulle as an arrogant pipsqueak without portfolio. It didn’t help that, far from playing the obeisant supplicant, an imperious De Gaulle was constantly making demands for information, money and weapons. Churchill found him amusing—”[De Gaulle] had to be rude to the British to prove to French eyes that he was not a British puppet. He certainly carried out this policy with perseverance”—but Roosevelt couldn’t stand him. “De Gaulle is out to achieve one-man government in France,” FDR’s son Elliot recalled him saying. “I can’t imagine a man I would distrust more.”
And, in another echo of Trump, Roosevelt obsessed over De Gaulle’s democratic bona fides. Who had elected this annoyingly prideful man, this dictator-in-training? No one.
Matters came to a head in late 1943 and early 1944, when the Allies were preparing for the Normandy invasion scheduled for June 1944. By then, Roosevelt had more withering contempt for De Gaulle than ever. De Gaulle had launched several freelance military operations against French colonies that had fallen under Vichy control, including Syria, Senegal and a pair of tiny islands adjacent to Canada’s maritime provinces, without bothering to consult with both of his Allied patrons (who would have refused permission).
Despite Churchill’s entreaties, Roosevelt was livid. He was determined to impose harsh AMGOT terms on France. As Le Monde Diplomatique reported in 2003, “AMGOT would have abolished [France’s] national sovereignty, including its right to issue currency.”
General Dwight Eisenhower, in charge of D-Day planning, expected France to resume its top-tier status as an economic and military power after the war. Moreover, he believed that Roosevelt’s stubbornness was blinding him to the fact that there was no practical alternative to installing De Gaulle and the Free French as the first postwar French government. The only other option was a communist takeover. The Free French could provide intelligence about the landing site and order the Resistance to attack and distract German forces behind enemy lines. A frustrated Ike slipped classified invasion plans to the Free French and promised them he would sabotage Roosevelt’s AMGOT plans.
The heroic assault on Omaha Beach is seared in our national memory as a straightforward, noble liberation of a beleaguered European ally. Behind the scenes, however, things were complicated.
In the same way that Trump hopes the U.S. will be compensated for the American investment in the defense of Ukraine with that country’s mineral wealth, Roosevelt wanted France to pay the U.S. for its own liberation. FDR ordered the U.S. Mint to print and distribute sheaves of English-language “flag-ticket francs” to Allied troops sent to Normandy. French shopkeepers who accepted them would be directed to look to the postwar French government, not the United States, to back them. When De Gaulle found out about the scheme, he declaimed the Allied scrip as fausse monnaie (fake money) and advised his radio listeners not to accept them.
Ignoring Roosevelt, Eisenhower embedded Free French forces into Operation Overlord. In the days following the June 6th landing, a wild scrum ensued as rival governments competed to seize mairies in each Norman village and city that fell under Allied control. AMGOT military governors were ordered to subject the populace to martial law; Vichy mayors refused to leave; Free French mayors declared themselves the lawful Provisional Government of the Republic of France; and, in some cases, communists and socialists hoping for a revolution shouted at one another and came to blows in local government offices.
In at least one instance, rival mayors and their forces occupied different floors in the same building and sporadically exchanged gunfire in stairwells. Allied forces under orders from Eisenhower persuaded the non-Free French wannabes to yield. AMGOT’s harsh plans for France were ignored and never put into effect.
By July, FDR was resigned to the facts on the ground. Newspapers reported that De Gaulle and his Free French were popular and greeted by enthusiastic crowds wherever they appeared. The conflict between the United States and its European ally was papered over by the liberation of Paris on August 25th, where De Gaulle famously stood tall the next day as bullets presumably fired by a residual Nazi sniper nearly struck him and everyone around him hit the ground. Finally, in October, the U.S. government formally recognized De Gaulle as president of the provisional government pending elections.
Anti-Americanism in France was partly fueled by this episode, which was well-known in postwar France thanks in part to Gaullists’ lingering resentments.
Whatever you think of Donald Trump’s attitude toward a beleaguered European ally, it was not unprecedented.
