Introduction

All the efforts that French business had made to distance itself from the Vichy regime were disastrously unsuccessful. The patronat achieved new peaks of political unpopularity at the liberation. This general unpopularity, which was reflected in political attacks and in the exclusion of businessmen from official posts, should be distinguished from the specific allegations about collaboration during the war, which were reflected in trials or in appearance before a comité professionnel d'épuration. In fact the unpopularity of the patronat was often not linked to wartime behaviour at all. In part this was because the liberation was used by the working-class movement to settle scores that dated back to the period between 1936 and 1939 (see chapter 9). More generally the wave of indignation against certain sections of business illustrated a kind of reflex action of the French political system. Indeed sometimes the attacks on business conducted under the provisional government mirrored those conducted under Vichy. Thus de Gaulle's famously chilly encounter with the delegation of industrialists led by Pinet in 1944 echoed that between Laval and the delegation of industrialists led by Lambert Ribot in 1940 (see chapter 8). The same groups were subjected to abuse during both periods. Thus the Comité des Forges, which had been dissolved by Vichy, hardly had time to reform before becoming a prime target for political attacks. However, under the provisional government, as under Vichy, the political hostility to big business was not converted into concrete assaults on business interests. In particular, there were remarkably few punitive nationalizations at the liberation. In this chapter the reasons for this light escape will be explored.