Contesting France

Contesting France tells the story of how a transnational web of French sources used their exchanges with US intelligence to shape American policy towards France in the early Cold War. A much-needed addition to intelligence studies, this book will interest students and researchers of the early Cold War.

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Contesting France reveals the untold role of intelligence in shaping American perceptions of and policy toward France between 1944 and 1947, a critical period of the early Cold War when many feared that French communists were poised to seize power. In doing so, it exposes the prevailing narrative of French unreliability, weakness, and communist intrigue apparent in diplomatic dispatches and intelligence reports sent to the White House as both overblown and deeply contested. Likewise, it shows that local political factions, French intelligence and government officials, colonial officers, and various trans-national actors in imperial outposts and in the metropole sought access to US intelligence officials in a deliberate effort to shape US policy for their own political postwar agendas. Using extensive archival research in the United States and France, Susan McCall Perlman sheds new light on the nexus between intelligence and policymaking in the immediate postwar era.