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.

Winner, 2024 Book Prize, International Intelligence History Association

'Perlman offers a revealing examination that decenters Washington and instead provides a deeply researched and beautifully written transnational and trans-imperial history. She recognizes that foreign policy is rarely the result of one voice. Instead, she highlights the myriad of voices, which jockeyed for position within and among, the various government agencies, and countries. This is intelligence history at its best.'

Sarah-Jane Corke - Co-Founder and Past-President of the North American Society for Intelligence History and Associate Professor at the University of New Brunswick

'Although intelligence remains international history’s ‘missing dimension,’ Perlman joins a small cadre of scholars committed to filling in the gap. Based on prodigious research in multinational archives, her innovative and masterful Contesting France enhances and complicates our understandings of early cold war history and intelligence’s pivotal yet problematic contribution to it.'

Richard Immerman - author of The Hidden Hand: A Brief History of the CIA

'By applying a 'trans-imperial' approach to the role of intelligence, Contesting France delivers an innovative, intricate, and convincing insight into the early Cold War. By placing emotion central to the narrative, this book demonstrates just what is possible with a 'new diplomatic history' approach to international relations. An exceptional achievement.'

Giles Scott-Smith - Roosevelt Chair in New Diplomatic History, Leiden University

'In this exceedingly well-written and argued book, Perlman’s assessment of American anxiety indicates that US intelligence officials had little grasp of internal French political stability, French nationalism, and independence movements in French colonies. This book could not be more relevant in urging us to think about how we gather, use, and abuse intelligence to achieve foreign policy goals.'

Kathryn C. Statler - author of Replacing France: The Origins of American Intervention in Vietnam