The first was the formation of the Monnet Plan, which rallied opinion behind the goal of national recovery and prevented the widening of a serious schism that had developed between planiste advocates of “structural reform” like Pierre Mendès-France, on the one hand, and free market liberals like Rene Pleven, on the other. Monnet established a tradition of technocratic leadership, the author argues, that enabled France to weather the crosswinds of Fourth Republic politics and without which policy might well have foundered.

The second key episode in Hitchcock’s view involved an increasing realization over the course of 1947 that France lacked the strength to prevent German recovery but could, by cooperating with the United States, guide it constructively. Thus, Bizonia became Trizonia, as France merged its zone of occupation in Germany with those of les Anglo-Saxons. After the announcement of the Marshall Plan, France also took the lead in organizing what would eventually become the Organization of European Economic Cooperation (OEEC). And by the beginning of 1948, it had agreed to the creation of an international authority that would promote the recovery of German heavy industry but at the same time grant France a voice in the allocation of Ruhr coal exports.

The third critical step in the process was the proposal of the Schuman Plan, which, as Hitchcock explains, preempted U.S. proposals to begin German rearmament by changing the diplomatic context; before such ideas could be tabled, the Federal Republic was invited to enter into a European partnership that would involve not the relinquishment of occupation economic controls but rather their incorporation into an overall coal-steel settlement.

Finally, Hitchcock maintains that by first proposing the creation of a European Defense Community and then, for over three and a half years, dragging its feet in the negotiations undertaken to set it up, the French managed to delay German rearmament until their economic recovery was an accomplished fact and a U.S. guarantee of European security a given. In lieu, therefore, of a European armed force composed of nationally integrated units, France accepted the incorporation of German units into NATO and at the same time agreed to a plan for the phasing out of occupation.

Hitchcock’s conclusions are in line with the prevailing views of both French and U.S. historians of postwar France, which emphasize the closeness of U.S. involvement and the intimacy of contact between critical policymakers of the two nations, the importance of the U.S. vision for Europe, and, at the same time, the ability of the French to use U.S. ideas and resources to advantage. Nevertheless, the book makes a couple of points with which one might take slight issue.

There is, first of all, much to recommend the argument originally developed by Richard Kuisel and restated most recently by Sylvia Lefèvre in Les relations économiques franco-allemandes de 1945 à 1955. De l’occupation à la coopération that the consensus and continuity in policy emphasized by Hitchcock dates from the war rather than from the lessons learned after it. A surprising amount of agreement existed among Vichy technocrats, Free French officials in London, and leading thinkers in the resistance that France needed to break with the past in order to modernize, and that this required a fresh departure with regard to the issue of Germany as well as a new openness with regard to the idea of European union. The Schaukelpolitik and negativism that pock-marked French policy immediately after the war was due to weakness rather than design. Policymakers, including the histrionic Charles de Gaulle, had few illusions about the realities of France’s power and were painfully aware of the nation’s desperate need for both access to German economic resources and guarantees against an over-hasty revival of the former Besatzungsimacht. Once these conditions had been met, long-term plans could be taken out of the drawer and put into play.

One might suggest, secondly, that the basis for the foreign policy consensus was more political than technocratic. Monnet was not a university-trained management specialist, first of all, but, as so often described, a “practical visionary,” whose greatest asset was a knack for deal-making behind the scenes. Le Plan was, in its first phase, in no sense a comprehensive program for economic development, but merely a program for steering investment into sectors thought to be critical to recovery. Its operations furthermore contributed substantially, as Hitchcock points out, to the raging inflation of the late 1940s, and the organization thus came under heavy and often-deserved criticism from economists and financial experts. The plan survived largely because Monnet managed to secure what amounted to U.S. funding for its projects.

Hitchcock’s account is, however, by no means inconsistent with an essentially political, as opposed to technocratic, view of the accomplishments of these years. In discussing the formation of the European coal-steel pool he argued forcefully for the unrecognized importance of Foreign Minister Schuman’s contribution to the outcome. This is a risky but necessary attempt. Since Schuman had nothing to do with the formulation of the famous 9 May 1950 proposal that bore his name and was always at least one stage removed from the negotiations that led to the eventual heavy industry settlement, it is difficult to demonstrate that he had much of anything to do with the end result. Yet the coal-steel pool would have little economic significance; it was important, overwhelmingly, as a foreign policy breakthrough – the first decisive step toward Franco-German reconciliation. As foreign minister, Schuman surely deserves the considerable credit Hitchcock assigns him.

So do his predecessors, Georges Bidault above all. This veritable cabinet fixture of the Fourth Republic was himself an important agent of continuity. As Hitchcock reminds the reader, Bidault had been foreign minister under de Gaulle and piloted the notable 1947 change of course; and he, together with Schuman, was also chiefly responsible for having gained priority for French security over German rearmament in U.S. policy toward Europe during the complicated negotiations that surrounded the European Defense Community and NATO during the early 1950s. The work of men like Bidault and Schuman is all the more impressive considering the vividness of war memories and the ease with which anti-Boche sentiment could be conjured up.

The fate of the European Defense Community would seem to underscore this point. It is difficult to understand why Hitchcock treats the outcome of the negotiations over it – the entrance of the Germans into NATO – as a triumph of French policy. The initiative that brought about the result (“The Eden Plan”) stemmed from the British, fulfilled a long-sought ambition of Adenauer, was fully consistent with the views of the Pentagon, and had up to the very collapse of the EDC negotiations been adamantly opposed by French opinion as something even worse than the proposed Euro-armed force. The NATO solution was, as Hitchcock maintains, nonetheless the right one for the French but not because it would enable Bundeswehr soldiers to defend the soil of France in Germany. For how real was the threat of a successful Soviet invasion by land on an already nuclearized continent? The NATO solution was sound because it put old ghosts to rest in Western Europe and thus set the stage for the future development of the integration process.

French policy in the ten years after World War II did not lack irony. It rested on a democratic consensus, though of policymakers rather than publics. It was powerful when France was weak, and would later weaken as France got stronger: the French cannot claim to have invented the Common Market, as they reasonably could the European Coal and Steel Community. Yet though this greatest of France’s diplomatic achievements gave rise to the phenomenon of integration, it had little operational importance; the institutions and market processes that advanced it would have other origins. And though security concerns were paramount in French policy during the period, the threat with which they were concerned was a phantom. The danger was not, as feared at the Quai, of a land war against an ancient enemy but of a possible holocaust almost unimaginable in scale and utterly disproportionate to any casus belli.