France fought hard to be treated as a major power in the immediate aftermath of World War II and was initially excluded from decision making, due in no small part to the personal hostility Roosevelt had for de Gaulle (which was deeply reciprocated). I will quote here the General :

*« Jamais les Anglo-Saxons ne consentirent à nous traiter comme des alliés véritables. Jamais ils ne nous consultèrent, de gouvernement à gouvernement, sur aucune de leurs dispositions. Par politique ou commodité, ils cherchaient à utiliser les forces françaises pour les buts qu’eux-mêmes avaient fixés, comme si ces forces leur appartenaient et en alléguant qu’ils contribuaient à les armer. » *

The Anglo-saxons never treated us as real allies. We were never consulted, on a governement to government basis, on any of their dispositions. Out of politics or convenience, they used French forces for the goals they had set themselves, as if those forces belonged to them, under the pretence that they had contributed in their equipment.

Roosevelt had significant mistrust for de Gaulle, whom he considered as a military opportunist with little legitimacy^0 (he had indeed not been elected). Americans favoured initially the Général Giraud and tried to prop him up as the leader of Free French forces^1, putting him in command of liberated Northern Africa and of the Armée d'Afrique. This had some success in parts of the Resistance (mostly right wing) made up of former vichysts / with links to the Army officer corps, which recognized his authority in 1942-43, before the efforts of de Gaulle to unite the Resistance under the Conseil National de la Résistance were successful.

Initially, the plan of US authorities was to set up an Allied Military Occupation Government in liberated France. 1500 US military government experts had been selected for this task, for a duration of 1 year before transition to a French government^2 , in which personnalities such as Jean Monnet (who maintained a close friendship with key US policymakers) could have been integrated. This was met with deep hostility by the Free French authorities, and by the French public (the idea of rule by foreign military experts is absolutely abhorrent -- also, I have no idea how they planned to rule over France as we are quite the unruly people). Free French authorities had even been kept in the dark about most planning details about D-Day (de Gaulle only learnt about the date in the very hours before it took place), most unfairly as the Resistance was a major source of intelligence for its planning : de Gaulle for instance refused adamantly to take part in the 20 years commemoration in 1964 since he never forgot this. As soon as the landings took place, de Gaulle imposed the authority of the Free French government (Gouvernement Provisoire de la République Française), with a very famous appearance in Bayeux^3, nominating prefects in the departments, and organizing a functioning administration out of the cadres of the Resistance and other available competences.

Once French rule on France was established, it became essential to establish France's status as a major power. Discord between the 3 Great Powers^4 was an essential leverage to this goal, and in particular, the British realization that they had much to gain from a French ally (which shared with them colonial aspirations, and would be a partner in a future Europe). Churchill was well known to be generally suportive of de Gaulle and the free French (much more than the Americans), and de Gaulle begrudgingly appreciated this. The French occupation zone in Germany and Austria was carved out of the British one at the demand of the British^5, and British support was essential in securing a French seat in the UN Security Council and among the judges at Nuremberg.

The continuous goal of French Foreign Policy in the early Vth republic (1958-1968) was to further assert this status as a major power, autonomously defending its interests from all other major powers, through the nuclear bomb program (Force de Frappe), space program, withdrawal from the NATO integrated command, etc. De Villepin's famous address in the UN security council in 2003, refusing to go to Iraq, remains in the strict continuity of this stance.

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^0 : « Notre mal de tête commun » : Churchill, Roosevelt et De Gaulle, Gloria Elizabeth Maguire, Revue d’Histoire Moderne & Contemporaine Année 1995 42-4 pp. 593-608

^1 : Les États-Unis et le problème français de novembre 1942 à juillet 1943, André Kaspi, Revue d’Histoire Moderne & Contemporaine Année 1971 18-2 pp. 203-236

^2 : Stéphane Simonnet, Claire Levasseur (cartogr.) et Guillaume Balavoine (cartogr.) (préf. Olivier Wieviorka), Atlas de la libération de la France : 6 juin 1944- 8 mai 1945 : des débarquements aux villes libérées, Paris, éd. Autrement, coll. « Atlas-Mémoire », 2004 (1re éd. 1994), 79 p. (ISBN 978-2-746-70495-4 et 2-746-70495-1, OCLC 417826733, notice BnF no FRBNF39169074), p 64

^3 : Le dernier « calvaire » du général de Gaulle en 1944. Les « accords de débarquement », Jean-Baptiste Duroselle, Politique étrangère Année 1982 47-4 pp. 1021-1033

^4 : Charles de Gaulle, observations d'outre-Atlantique, Anton W. DePorte, Politique étrangère Année 1986 51-1 pp. 93-106

^5 : http://docnum.univ-lorraine.fr/public/UPV-M/Theses/1994/Perrein_Engels.Helene.LMZ9412_1.pdf