René Cassin and the Invention of Free France, 1940–41

This article offers a new perspective on the French lawyer René Cassin (1887–1976) by studying his intellectual contributions in founding General de Gaulle’s Free France during the Second World War (1940–41). Closely reading his key written and spoken interventions in London in their context, it demonstrates that his arguments to legitimize Free France and delegitimize the Vichy Regime were intellectually and historically meaningful. In doing so, it rebalances the scholarship which concentrates on Cassin as a jurist and functionary, to instead present Cassin as a wartime political thinker. Eighty years after the Liberation of France, it revisits the implications of Cassin’s arguments for twentieth-century French history. In his view, the French Republic continued to exist through Free France, whereas the Vichy Regime was not ‘France’. The present article attributes a greater responsibility to Cassin than previously established in theorising Free France and this Gaullist interpretation of history.