The French historian, writer and former journalist Georgette Elgey died in Paris on October 8th at the age of 90. Her extraordinary life brought her close to many of the main actors of post-war French politics, including up to recent years. She was above all known for her acclaimed historical work, published in six volumes, of France’s Fourth Republic, the system of government in place between 1946-1958 when the country was rebuilt from the devastation of WWII.
In 2017, Elgey published an intimate personal account of her life, entitled Toutes fenêtres ouvertes (All windows open), a sequel to her 1973 book, La Fenêtre ouverte, whose title referred to her adopted habit, during the WWII German occupation of France, of sleeping with an open window as a means of fleeing arrest, a period when she and her Jewish mother narrowly escaped deportation.
In Toutes fenêtres ouvertes, she recounted her rich and fascinating existence. It was a life that began as the illegitimate child, born on February 24th 1929, of French historian Georges Lacour-Gayet, who was then aged 73, and who refused to legally recognize her. Her mother, Madeleine Léon, was from an upper middle-class French Jewish family. Prevented from using Lacour-Gayet’s family name, she invented her own from its initials – LG, which in French is pronounced “Elgey”.
Beginning a successful career as a journalist in post-war France, she was acquainted with a number of leading politicians, and remained so until late in life. In the early 1960s, before becoming an editorial director with French publishing house Fayard, she set about writing her Histoire de la IVe République when, as she explains in the interview below, “I had no idea what I was going to undertake”. The sixth and final volume of this monumental work was published in 2012, almost five decades after the first.
In between, she was invited by François Mitterrand, shortly after his election as president in 1981, to lead an unusual project at the Élysée Palace. Mitterrand, who she had known since the late 1950s, wanted her to record, behind closed doors and for posterity, the accounts of those involved in daily politics at the pinnacle of state. The project, which at its conclusion was to be handed over to the French National Archives centre, continued into Mitterrand’s second seven-year term as president following his re-election in 1988.
In April 2017, on the publication of Toutes fenêtres ouvertes, she gave an interview to Mediapart at her small apartment on the boulevard Saint-Germain in the Paris Latin Quarter, republished below.
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Mediapart: Is your method of work that of basing yourself on written sources, but not to the exclusion of oral sources?
Georgette Elgey: ‘My method’ – what a way of putting it! I have always found it difficult to imagine that my work could be taken seriously. When I began L’Histoire de la IVe République |The History of the Fourth Republic] at the beginning of the 1960s, I had no idea what I was going to undertake.
It was Roger Stéphane who engaged me on that path, when I had left journalism. He knew that I had enjoyed working with Robert Aron on his book L’Histoire de Vichy [published in 1954] – a work which is today obsolete; I recognise that, while defending it for what it had in terms of honesty and novelty. So Roger Stéphane suggested to me that I write the follow up. ‘Follow up?’; ‘Yes’, he told me, ‘the Fourth Republic’. Now, it happened that I knew two men who had left their stamp on this regime; Pierre Mendès France, whose stature had marked my generation, and Maurice Schumann, former spokesman for the Free French forces in [exile during the WWII German occupation of France] in London, a Christian Democrat by conviction, a Gaullist at heart. I went to see them to submit my project and they spontaneously offered to hand me their archives.
It was the same with Félix Gouin, who I didn’t know, and who offered me all the archives of his government. Idem with Pierre July, former secretary of state with the council presidency under [1953-1954 prime minister] Joseph Laniel, who I met in the building on the avenue Frédéric-Le-Play where François Mitterrand [French president from 1981-1995] would die, and who opened up before me an enormous Norman wardrobe and gave me every possible document – in particular about the strikes in the summer of 1953, not forgetting the minutes of the Higher Defence Committee, virtually all stenotyped, up to the affair of the leaks in 1955 – and which concerned all the issues of public policies. I was weighed under with papers.
[Editor’s note: the strikes of the summer of 1953 were organised by trades unions representing public-sector employees in opposition to then prime minister Joseph Laniel’s move to implement, by decree, state spending cuts that included pushing back their retirement age. The movement ended with the withdrawal of the planned reforms. The 1955 leaks affair centred on a plot to destabilise the government, when François Mitterrand (interior minister from 1954-1955) was notably wrongly accused of leaking confidential minutes of the Higher Defence Committee to the French Communist Party.]
Mediapart: Why were the documents which you were given not handed over to the National Archives?
G.E.: There was no collection [of them] then like there is today. Politicians kept their archives. All the more so given that we were still close to the Liberation [of France from WWII German occupation] and it didn’t appear impossible that one day the justice authorities might question them about their past actions. To keep archives was to keep evidence to be able to defend oneself. However, with the exception of historians René Rémond or Pierre Renouvin, it was not the done thing to question the political players of the time. It was considered bad journalism in the eyes of the academic establishment. What was oral had no value. One worked only with written documents, what’s more with a gap of at least one generation between the events and those researching them.
Before the book was published, the lawyer of [French publishing house] éditions Fayard wanted me to delete extracts that I was including of meetings of the Higher Defence Committee. Because all the activity of this body was subject to the [classified information status] ‘secret défense’, he foresaw the blocking of [the publication of] the book. My publisher and I didn’t follow his advice. And there was not trial.
General de Gaulle sent me an ironic message congratulating me on my exceptional documentation. It amused him to discover that the records of the Fourth Republic were out there in the wilds, which to his eyes confirmed the irresponsible inanity of such a regime. The general, on the other hand, would not have stood for the same to be made of any document concerning the Fifth [Republic, the current constitution (and system of government) of France which de Gaulle created in 1958].
So I learnt how to work, little by little, on the job, but there was no method, at the start, on my part.
Mediapart: Have you come under fire from the ‘establishment’ of French historians?
G.E.: A certain irritation among academics of my generation, yes. It was thus that [French historian, specialised in the political history of the French republic] Michel Winock considered that the second volume, that which was scattered with quotes from the Higher Defence Committee, which had remained until then unknown to all, contained nothing new. But what can one expect, I had not the least university diploma and I went gaily walking about on their territory, something which didn’t prevent three of the best among them – François Bédarida, Jean-Noël Jeanneney and Pierre Nora – from lending me their constant support.
Mediapart: How can one explain the ease with which politicians gave you both their retrospective analyses and the deep contents of their archives?
G.E.: The page had been turned, no-one was interested in the defunct Fourth Republic except me, who was not considered to be politically engaged, even if I was both a Gaullist and supporter of Mendès France. They had confidence in me. All the more so because I established a rule which I have always abided by; I would submit to them every quote received which I was to use.
Mediapart: Was it, to their mind, a means of countering the Gaullist narrative?
G.E.: Yes. They wanted to justify themselves and defend themselves against the dark legend of the Fourth Republic, on which was built the Fifth Republic. The latter imposed a silence over the former, which was presented as a foil [one of instability, and party regimes].
Whereas it was not, from end to end, a catastrophe. The regime [of the Fourth Republic] had inherited, after the end of the [second world] war, a divided and ruined France, which nevertheless picked itself up by entering the industrial world. For sure, the Fourth Republic had understood absolutely nothing about decolonisation, but it’s easy to say that after events.
Mediapart: What is your view of the instability of the Fourth Republic?
G.E.: That it can have an advantage. When people remain in power for a short time, corruption is less able to accomplish its devastations. More seriously, the Fourth republic was not driven by political professionals, but often by persons who had placed their lives on the line under the Nazi occupation. They wanted to do something, and not simply engage in a [political] career like today. To have a career is evidence of stability, to which the country has little to win from.
Mediapart: There were however those who had long careers under the Fourth republic, of which some continued under the Fifth Republic, like, for example, Edgar Faure.
G.E.: Yes, of course, but this lawyer who revealed himself during the war had, all the same, one or two sincere convictions – decolonisation and the necessity of maintaining good relations with the Soviet Union.
My approach was never that of a litigator or prosecutor, to defend the more democratic proportional electoral system, or on the contrary to combat a confiscating caste. I simply wanted to recount, the most honestly as possible, what happened.
Mediapart: But you have an opinion on the parliamentarianism of before 1962.
G.E.: It was another world, not only in the way it functioned, but in those who composed it. Robert Lacoste and General [Georges] Catroux knew all the poems of Verlaine by heart. Try and find their equivalent in a parliamentarian or army officer today. Words counted for something then, not just to deliver wonderful speeches but to act upon, and with, the people.
Mendès France was the first to dare to call on the attention of citizens to establish that our country should no longer lay claim to governing Indochina. There were also speeches in the Chamber [lower house of Parliament] capable of changing the course of events, notably when René Mayer [French prime minister in 1953] and René Pleven [who served twice as prime minister from 1950-51, then 1951-52]succeeded, in 1953, in avoiding a quasi-secession of Alsace during the painful trial of the perpetrators, German and Alsatian, of the [1944] massacres of the [Waffen-SS] Das Reich division in [the central France region of] Limousin. Speech, at that time, was capable of being a political act par excellence, capable of changing things.
Mediapart: What do you think of the « majority of ideas » that socialist Michel Rocard attempted to build when he was prime minister between 1988 and 1991, when he had only a relative majority in parliament?
G.E.: I know little of the history of the Fifth Republic.
Mediapart: But you were close to the Élysée, during the two seven-year presidential terms of François Mitterrand.
G.E.: I was indeed put in charge, by president Mitterrand, of a project about which I will never speak, which involved carrying out, at that very time, what I did a posteriori regarding the Fourth republic – recording the accounts of the players in the history as it was being made. Only the president was allowed to consult them, before they were handed to the National Archives which François Mitterrand wanted thus to enrich with an exceptional collection for the future. It was fascinating, thrilling, notably during the first ‘cohabitation’ [when the socialist Mitterrand presided over a rightwing government led by Jacques Chirac] between 1986 and 1988. It will be discovered later how this was lived from day to day by the Élysée.
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Georgette Elgey’s six-volume work Histoire de la IVe République, and also her books Toutes fenêtres ouvertes and La Fenêtre ouverte, are published in France by Fayard.
- The original text of this interview in French, which was first published by Mediapart on on May 6th 2017, can be found here.
English version by Graham Tearse