The American Friend

The Second World War is where Branca's archives bite hardest, because the gap between the French memory and the American record is widest there. The French memory is Normandy and liberation. The American record, in Franklin Roosevelt's own correspondence, is a sustained distrust of Charles de Gaulle that bordered on contempt. Roosevelt did not see de Gaulle as the legitimate voice of France. He saw an ambitious general with no electoral mandate, prone to posturing, and for a long stretch he preferred to deal with almost anyone else.

That preference had consequences. For much of the war, Washington maintained relations with the Vichy regime, betting that figures compromised by collaboration might be more pliable than a proud Free French leader. When the Allies landed in North Africa in 1942, they cut a deal with Admiral Darlan, a Vichy man, rather than with de Gaulle. Roosevelt's real plan, documented in the planning around what was called AMGOT, was to govern liberated France as occupied territory under American military administration, printing its own francs, as if France were a defeated enemy rather than an ally to be restored.

After 1945 the pressure changed register. It stopped being about armies and became about money, which is harder to see and harder to resist. The Marshall Plan, launched in 1947, poured billions into a wrecked Europe and did genuine good. It also tied the recipients into an economic order designed in Washington, oriented toward American exports, and conditioned on political alignment, which in practice meant keeping communists out of government. Aid was never only generosity; it was generosity with a direction of travel, and Branca is careful to show both halves at once rather than collapse one into the other.

Underneath it sat the dollar. The Bretton Woods arrangement had made the American currency the anchor of the whole system, and that anchor became a lever. It was de Gaulle, back in power, who said the quiet part out loud in the 1960s, denouncing what his finance minister Valéry Giscard d'Estaing called the "exorbitant privilege" — the fact that America could run deficits the rest of the world was obliged to finance simply because it issued the reserve currency. De Gaulle started converting French dollar reserves into gold, a pointed act of defiance, and pulled France out of NATO's integrated command in 1966.

Step back from the episodes and a shape appears that Branca wants us to sit with. The Franco-American relationship has never been a friendship between equals, because the two countries were never in a position to be equal. One is a continental superpower with the reserve currency, the dominant military, and the long reach; the other is a middle power with memory, prestige, and a seat at tables it no longer fully controls. Calling that a friendship isn't a lie, exactly. It's a courtesy that obscures the slope the ground is on.

The asymmetry is structural, not personal, and that's what makes it durable. It survived the warmth between specific leaders and the froideur between others. It outlasted Wilson, Roosevelt, de Gaulle, every handshake and every snub. When France aligned, as it mostly did after de Gaulle, it reaped the benefits of the American umbrella. When it broke ranks, as in 2003 over the invasion of Iraq, it felt the cost quickly, in diplomatic isolation and in the small humiliations like "freedom fries." The menu of choices was always set in Washington, and France's freedom amounted to picking from a list it had no hand in writing.

The crowds on the Champs-Élysées in 1944 weren't deceived about what they were feeling. The liberation was real, the dead were real, the relief was real. Branca's book doesn't take any of that away. It just sets the celebration next to the cables and the planning memos and asks us to hold both at once — the gratitude France felt and the calculation Washington ran, side by side, describing the same events from two incompatible angles.