1000 Years of Annoying the French

by Stephen Clarke

  In retrospect it still seems hard to believe that, after such an obsessive wartime campaign to seal personal glory for France and himself, de Gaulle just walked away from office. But this is to misunderstand the man. He wasn’t just any old wartime leader. In his head, de Gaulle was the new Napoleon.

  It all adds up – the fury whenever les Anglais went anywhere near a part of the French Empire; the horror at the idea that les Anglo-Saxons were invading France (albeit as liberators); the victorious homecoming to the Arc de Triomphe; the ‘I am France’-style declarations; even the way in which he’d risen to prominence as the techno-savvy man of the moment. He was the new Bonaparte. And like Bonaparte (at least until his final exile), de Gaulle knew that his nation might reject him now, but they would soon regret it and clamour for him to come back.

  And when he did return, it was the Brits and Americans who were going to suffer.

  * Sartre was released on the orders of President de Gaulle, who said, ‘You don’t arrest Voltaire.’

  * Film star Catherine Deneuve’s father, Maurice Dorléac, acted in radio plays on the same station. After the war, he was banned from performing for six months.

  * The Allies didn’t let themselves be distracted by the Channel Islands, which weren’t liberated until May 1945, by which time the islanders were starving and even the Nazi garrison was reduced to sneaking over to France to steal food.

  * Von Choltitz is said by some to have saved Paris by refusing to obey Hitler’s orders to blow up the city. However he planted explosives under many key buildings, and in the days just prior to his capitulation he burned down the Grand Palais, destroyed Paris’s cereal stocks and had Resistance fighters executed en masse. He was no Saint Choltitz.

  27

  Le Temps du Payback

  Britain, the USA and France emerged from the Second World War scarred but fundamentally happy. Despite the heavy human and economic cost, they had all, in their own ways, won great moral as well as military victories. The dictators had been toppled, the invaders repelled, their perverted ideals frustrated. Well, almost, because Stalin was proving to be something of a headache and, thanks to Churchill and Roosevelt, he controlled quite a large part of Europe. But now the Allies could sit down and plan the way forward for the brave new free Western world, n’est-ce pas?

  Er, non merci, came the answer from France, a response that was repeated even more loudly and frequently after Charles de Gaulle returned to power. As the Général had shown throughout the war, France had its own priorities. It even created a new philosophy based on this –l’exception française, the basic thrust of which was ‘we’ve had enough of these Anglo-Saxon conneries.’

  But why all the French negativity? Well, like the drowning man who is pulled out of the canal by his old worst enemy, post-war France was carrying a painful burden of resentment relating to the Liberation. From 1940 to 1944, not only had the old worst enemy pulled the French out of the canal, but it had also given them a roof over their head, warm clothes and a hot meal, and then escorted them home in a chauffer-driven limousine. The implied debt of moral gratitude was too much, and after 1945 France was determined to show that it didn’t need all this patronizing help. It also wanted revenge.

  At last, a good French joke

  While de Gaulle was in the wilderness (well, at home in the east of France writing his war memoirs), the Brits upheld their ancient tradition of annoying their Gallic neighbours.

  In 1947, during one of the bitterest winters in living memory, Britain stopped exporting coal. This was a purely defensive measure, to ensure that its own home fires kept burning, but it was also a perfectly well-aimed kick in the crotch of France’s slowly recovering industries, which ground to a temporary halt. Not content with this, Britain struck another cruel economic blow in 1949 when it devalued the pound, suddenly making French goods prohibitively expensive on the world market compared to their competitors across the Channel. Whatever happened to la solidarité?

  The Americans added their own fuel to the diplomatic fire during the creation of NATO in 1948 and 1949. The French had originally seen this an international organization to protect Europe against renewed aggression from Germany, but when the Cold War started in earnest, the USA got together with Britain and made sure that the new NATO was primarily an anti-Soviet initiative. To make it even clearer that they were ignoring France’s wishes, the Anglo-Saxons actually made provisions for Germany to join the military alliance. The prospect of one day being hauled out of the canal by yet another old enemy was hard for France to swallow, even more so when British and French defence specialists discussed their exit strategy in case of an overwhelming Soviet attack, and the Brits proposed a massive evacuation via Dunkirk. They were serious, too.

  France had the final laugh, though, by generously offering to host NATO’s military headquarters, SHAPE (Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers in Europe). This was an obviously English name that probably irritated the French a little, but they got their own back by building the HQ at Rocquencourt, a little town 20 kilometres outside Paris that was almost impossible for an Anglo-Saxon to spell or pronounce correctly.

  The Brits and Americans might well have wondered why the French were so keen on this Parisian suburb. Did they think the old quarry there would make a good nuclear bunker? Was it because nearby Versailles would be a nice place for the NATO soldiers to visit on their days off? Or could it possibly have been because Rocquencourt was the site of Napoleon’s last battle?

  You see, the Brits might be under the impression that the defeat at Waterloo on 18 June 1815 was the Empereur’s swan song, but in fact, two weeks later, his army fought one last time, and actually won a great victory.

  On 1 July 1815, the invading Prussians were about to enter Paris when a French army lured them into an ambush at Rocquencourt, where they gave them a good sabre-bashing and took 400 prisoners. The Prussians subsequently sent in reinforcements, chased the remnants of Napoleon’s army away and captured Paris, but in French minds that is irrelevant. What really matters is that France won this last battle and that Napoleon was therefore, in the final analysis, a victor and not, as the Anglais always try to imply, a loser.

  Almost no one has ever heard of the Battle of Rocquencourt, which probably made the French chuckle as they put the site forward to be NATO’s military HQ. It had to be one of the best military in-jokes ever.

  L’Empire strikes back

  Meanwhile, Britain was prancing about on the moral high ground with regard to its empire. India was independent (although bloodily so) and the Brits had extricated themselves from Palestine. An uprising in Kenya was being kept under control thanks to native African troops, and Malaya had been promised independence and was therefore working with Britain to oust Communist insurgents. By contrast, the Algerians began rebelling against French rule in 1945, and the Communist leader Ho Chi Minh was leading a revolt in Indochina. France’s empire was on the verge of exploding.

  Unlike the Brits, who mainly steered clear of long colonial wars and advised France to do the same, the French dug in, pitching their greatest generals (apart from le Général, that is) against the Vietnamese rebels. But even men like General Leclerc could do nothing to stop Ho Chi Minh, who had honed his battle skills against the Japanese, and it all ended very messily in 1954, when the French decided to make a stand in a valley called Dien Bien Phu.

  Assuming that mere Asian guerrillas would never be able to win a pitched battle, the French dug World War One-style trenches, and were horrified when the highly organized Viet Minh began bombarding them with deadly accuracy from the surrounding hills. It was almost as though the rebels had been sneakily reading Napoleon’s war manuals. The French artillery commander was so heartbroken at being out-thought and outgunned that he went into a bunker and blew himself up with a hand grenade.

  After almost two months of savage fighting, the Viet Minh finally overran the French, taking more than 11,000 prisoners. Independence talks began in Geneva on 8 May 1954, exactl
y nine years since France’s victory in Europe, and took place to an infuriating background chorus from Britain and America of ‘told you so’.

  The French extracted the dregs of a victory by obtaining an agreement whereby, instead of letting Ho Chi Minh hold nationwide elections that he would almost certainly have won, the country was divided into two, with the southern part ruled by a puppet pro-French ruler – which planted the seeds of the Vietnam War that would so annoy the Americans a decade later.

  Unfortunately for France, though, Ho Chi Minh had given other people ideas, and revolts either broke out or intensified in the French territories of Cameroon, Tunisia, Morocco and – bloodiest of all – Algeria. The Brits provoked French wrath by refusing to sell them helicopters for use in Algeria, yet again showing the typiquement anglais capacity for posing on the moral high ground. It was almost as if the two countries had never been allies at all. In fact, the only highpoint in Anglo-French relations during the whole period was a farcical low point in both nations’ histories …

  Britain pulls the plug on the Suez Canal

  In 1956, Colonel Nasser, the President of Egypt, declared that the Suez Canal, the vital lifeline between east and west and the main artery of European presence in the Middle East, was being nationalized. The French had built the canal, and a French company, the Compagnie universelle du canal maritime de Suez, had run it since its completion in 1869. But on 26 July 1956, Nasser passed a Nationalization Law and announced that all shares would be bought by Egypt at the day’s closing price on the stock market. This was a perfectly legal move, but was obviously made to undermine British and French prestige in the region.

  The French were already looking for an excuse to bash Nasser. He was supplying the Algerian rebels with military advisers and weapons – some of which had been sold to Egypt by the Brits. So France suggested a Franco-British invasion to take control of the canal. The French even offered to let the Brits command the invading army (thereby ensuring that the squeaky-clean Anglais would get their fingers dirty in a colonial war), and said that they could guarantee success by involving their new friends the Israelis, who were also chomping at the bit to cut the belligerent Nasser down to size.

  The British PM, Anthony Eden, a Francophile who had worked as an intermediary between de Gaulle and Churchill during World War Two, was hesitant, but gave the go-ahead for hush-hush talks between French, Israeli and British negotiators. They were to meet at a top-secret location – a house in the chic Paris suburb of Sèvres – and fine-tune their joint strategy. Basically, Israel would invade and topple Nasser, and the Brits and French would then intervene, supposedly as peacemakers but in fact to regain a foothold in Egypt. A cunning plan.

  As a veteran of 1940–44 London, Eden ought to have known that the concept ‘top secret’ was relative where Anglo-French relations were concerned, and he really shouldn’t have been surprised when his men came back to London with the invasion plan written out in black and white, whereas their instructions had been to make sure that nothing whatsoever was committed to paper. It was as if the French were setting him up.

  They were certainly pitching Eden against his ally President Eisenhower, who was opposed to military intervention. And when the Anglo-Franco-Israeli attack began in October 1956, the Brits showed once again where their true loyalties lay. The invasion, and the consequent doubts about Britain’s role in the Middle East, hit sterling so hard on the money markets that Eden was forced to prop the currency up with borrowed American dollars, a loan he received on condition that he surrender to Eisenhower’s pressure and pull out of Egypt. The French urged him to stand up to the Americans, at least until Nasser had been fatally weakened, but Eden sheepishly confessed that he had already made his promise to Eisenhower. Suez was history.

  For France, this was the final straw. It was Dunkirk all over again. The Brits were as untrustworthy as ever, but were now even more despicable because they were at the beck and call of their new American masters.

  The French decided that they would win their colonial wars on their own, but got themselves so deep in the mire in Algeria that their army mutinied. A crack unit of French paratroopers even invaded Corsica (wanting, perhaps, to gain inspiration from a visit to Napoleon’s birthplace?) and was said to be planning an invasion of the mainland to seize political power.

  De Gaulle, meanwhile, was sitting in the watchtower-cum-office he had built for himself at his house in the village of Colombey-les-Deux-Églises, gazing down on France as it made a fool of itself. He was like the wizened old player in an American baseball movie – he wrings his hands at the mess these uppity newcomers are making of his team, but deep down he knows that one day they’ll call him and beg him to come and win the crunch match of the season for them.

  The call came on 28 May 1958. As Paris sat at its dinner table wondering when the rebel paratroopers were going to start floating out of the sky, the French President, René Coty, invited de Gaulle to step up to the plate and take over the country. When the Général’s political opponents raised objections, he countered, ‘Who really believes that, at the age of sixty-seven, I would begin a career as a dictator?’

  De Gaulle was back in power and mightily pleased with himself. Even Napoleon hadn’t managed a comeback after twelve whole years away. Now people were going to see what a Frenchman could really achieve on the world stage.

  The French want to kill their Général

  It took almost four years for de Gaulle to sort things out at home, because a powerful section of the French establishment really did not want to let go of Algeria. An army-led group called the Organisation armée secrète carried out terrorist attacks in mainland France; the police massacred around 200 Algerian immigrants after a protest march in Paris; and de Gaulle himself survived over thirty assassination attempts – not by Algerian independence fighters but by Frenchmen. The worst of these was a machine-gun attack on his car, during which bullets whistled past the head of both the Général and his wife. But de Gaulle had been sniped at before, and emerged unfazed. He negotiated Algerian independence and then turned his full attention to the Anglo-Saxons.

  In 1957, France had set up a Common Market with Belgium, Luxembourg, Holland, Italy and West Germany. Faced with the danger of being excluded from doing business with the above countries, in 1958 the Brits decided that they might like to join in the fun.

  However, there was one part of the Common Market agreement, the Treaty of Rome, that Britain didn’t want to sign up to – the agricultural policy, which even fifty years ago already looked to sceptics as though it was purely geared to keeping French farmers in business. Consequently, Britain offered to join the Common Market for all goods except agricultural produce.

  The French puffed with despair at this eternal British desire to bend the rules in their favour (perhaps France thought that it ought to have a monopoly on that?) and de Gaulle broke off the discussions. He made the rejection even clearer by lobbying for the creation of a full-blown Common Agricultural Policy, which was implemented in 1962 and set French farmers up on the unassailable pedestal they still occupy so proudly today.

  The British Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, was sure that de Gaulle was excluding the Brits because he saw them both as puppets for the Americans and as rivals for European domination. The Frenchman could never, Macmillan said, forgive the Anglo-Saxons for the Liberation. And he was exactly right. De Gaulle knew that he was top dog in the new Europe, and he wasn’t going to share power.

  Even so, Macmillan was determined to persuade the Général to soften his stance, and invited him to come shooting on his country estate at Birch Grove in Sussex. The PM was a real old country gent, and loved nothing better than pottering about in tweeds blasting at wildlife. De Gaulle accepted the invitation, but it didn’t turn out to be the cosy sporting weekend Macmillan had hoped for. Alarmed by the attempts on his life, the Frenchman always travelled with a stock of blood in case he needed a transfusion, but Mrs Macmillan, who was a bit of an eccentri
c (she used to garden at night in a miner’s helmet), refused point blank to have the gruesome stuff in the house. The French had to bring a special fridge with them and set it up in an outbuilding. Worse, de Gaulle’s security guards ruined the shooting by crashing about in the woods and disturbing the pheasants. They clearly weren’t sporting men.

  A return visit to the French presidential palace in the forest of Rambouillet near Paris at the end of 1962 didn’t go any better. Here, de Gaulle was on a reassuringly firm historic footing. It was at Rambouillet in 1944 that he had written his ‘Paris libéré’ speech. The Général felt so at ease that when he took Macmillan shooting, he simply stood by and made loud comments whenever the PM missed a shot.

  De Gaulle also made it clear that he saw little point in talks about Britain joining the Common Market. He told Macmillan straight that as things stood, France could veto anything it wanted in Europe and lord it over Germany, whereas if Britain came in, things would be much less comfortable. He also insisted on speaking without an interpreter, and although Macmillan spoke very good French, conversation was inevitably one-sided. De Gaulle later described Macmillan as ‘this poor man, to whom I had nothing to offer’, who looked so beaten that ‘I wanted to put my hand on his shoulder and tell him, don’t cry, Milord’ – a joking reference to an Édith Piaf song, ‘Ne pleurez pas, Milord’.

  De Gaulle didn’t stop there. He went on to make some astonishing statements that gave the coup de grâce to Britain’s application to join the EC. Britain had been trying to exist alongside Europe without really joining in for 800 years, he said (although he could have added another couple of centuries to that). He also slammed the Brits for accepting American Polaris missiles, more evidence that Britain was in the pocket of the USA and therefore not a reliable European ally. And when one of de Gaulle’s own ministers criticized him for forgetting the Entente Cordiale, he simply reminded the man of Agincourt and Waterloo. To de Gaulle, scuppering the Common Market negotiations was pure historical revenge.