851.01/848
The Delegation of the French National Committee in the United States to the Department of State
Memorandum
1. The French National Committee understands that the United States Government feels the urgent need of taking measures of security concerning the French territories still under the control of the Vichy Government. Nevertheless, the National Committee thinks that the method which the United States Government seems to wish to adopt runs the risk of entailing the gravest consequences for France and her Empire. It amounts practically to the demilitarization of the French colonies in the Caribbean Sea, French sovereignty being maintained and exercised by Admiral Robert, who would have to furnish positive guaranties. The American Government would have the intention of safeguarding these possessions for the French people.
2. The future of France will depend in a very large measure on the active part she will have taken in the war and the victory. The two principal elements of the French participation are the internal resistance and the active cooperation of the territories freed from the terms of the armistice.
Now, under the present circumstances, these two forces run the risk of being ruined by neutralization. The system of neutralization of the parts of the Empire not subject to the control of Vichy prevents such cooperation from developing and deprives France practically of the last elements of force which remain to her to win back her place in the world.
In fact that confirms the regime of the armistice and extends it to the parts of over-seas France on which Germany has not had the means of imposing it. That constitutes an apology for the capitulation and tends indeed to create categories of Frenchmen, who, having the means of fighting for their country, may consider themselves to be exempted from doing so, and whose passive attitude will be approved by the Allies. Nothing could be more demoralizing for the Frenchmen in France whose resistance, in spite of famine, arrests, shootings, is possible only because of an energy and a spirit of sacrifice often carried to the point of heroism.
In this regard the neutralization of certain French territories neglects the fact that this war is above all a conflict of moral forces. In the situation in which France finds itself the moral factor is preponderant.
[Page 526]3. Moreover, applied now to one French colony, now to another, this method results in fact in the complete breaking up of the Empire and cannot fail to lead to a break up of France itself. Already, at the present time the home country is divided materially and morally by the line of demarcation. One part of over-seas France is in the hands of the Japanese, another under the control of Vichy, the third under the authority of the French National Committee. The American policy will create one more, that of Admiral Robert. Tomorrow perhaps French West Africa will also be given a separate regime under the authority of such or such power. The propaganda of Berlin and Vichy will have a free play to develop the theme of Anglo-Saxon imperialism and to try to convince the French people that the Allies do not deserve its confidence and that they are trying to profit from its misfortunes to rob it.
The French will to resist may be seriously affected thereby. This will is closely bound up with the name of General de Gaulle; it rests on the conviction that the place of France in the Allied camp remains marked by Combatant France. If the French nation perceives that this is not the case at all, that General de Gaulle is not even consulted with respect to the French territories, that he is not able to prevent the dismemberment of the Empire, discouragement may take possession of the French masses at the moment when their resistance is one of the most important trumps of the Allies.
If in France the will to resist, symbolic and supported by Combatant France, should weaken, we should see the only uniting factor now conceivable among the French vanish; the country would then be surrendered to all the undertakings of disintegration. After the departure of the Germans and the inevitable disappearance of the Vichy Government, no authority could unite the French. The country would be turned over to anarchy.
The work of European reconstruction and reorganization of the world would not thereby be facilitated.
4. As for the Free French, they would lose all esteem in the eyes of their people and in their own eyes, if the Allied Powers deprived them systematically of the means of increasing France’s share in the conflict, and of continuing to stimulate and organize the internal resistance.
5. One of the principal objectives of Combatant France being to rally the greatest possible number of Frenchmen animated by the will to continue the struggle for the deliverance of the country, it goes without saying that it is ready to welcome all [men of]57 good will and all who sincerely return to the great duty of the war.
[Page 527]It intends to leave aside only the personalities who, too much compromised in the capitulation or the collaboration with the enemy, shall have lost all title to the confidence of the French people.
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