851.00/12–2047: Telegram
The Ambassador in France (Caffery) to the Secretary of State
5482. From the point of view of our general interests in Europe as well as from the point of view of our interest in the survival of democracy in western Europe, the scission yesterday in the CGT is the most important event that has occurred in France since the Liberation.1 It is all the more important because it follows on the heels of the failure of the Communist-inspired political strikes; strikes which from an economic point of view were fully justified in view of the prevailing low wages and high prices.
The Department is aware that at the time of the Liberation the Communists seized the levers of command of the trade unions and have been running the unions with a high hand ever since. Some of the non-Communist labor leaders did not support the scission mainly because they held comfortable jobs in the CGT, had comfortable offices in the CGT headquarters and money to spend. The leaders of France [Force] Ouvrière will not have comfortable jobs, will not have comfortable offices and now have no money to spend.
[Page 820]No one could have foreseen this break a few months ago and a few months ago the young militants who forced the break could not have done so.
They had the courage to do so yesterday for two reasons: The failure of masses of workmen to follow the Communist leadership in the strikes and growing appreciation of what the “Marshall Plan” means to France.
For the past three years non-Communist workmen had been bemoaning their fate to us in the Embassy. They did not like what was going on in the CGT but they were doing nothing about it.
- Léon Jouhaux and five other non-Communist labor leaders resigned from the executive committee of the CGT to form a rival group, the Force Ouvrière, also known as the CGT-Force Ouvrière, or OGT-FO.↩