by Roy Jenkins
Ten weeks later on 11 November there was a third Champs Elysées parade. At a time of severe adversity Churchill had said to de Gaulle: ‘One day we’ll go down the Champs Elysées together.’ He was determined to do so, and de Gaulle recognized that he had to discharge the obligation. But in the pictures they do not match. Churchill looked determinedly happy. De Gaulle looked sour. He did not like sharing occasions. It was the less attractive side of his character. By then, however, he was engaged not in looking forward to governing a liberated although impoverished and divided France but in the more intractable task of actually doing it, and, this first time round, was proving by no means adept.
The last months of 1944 were not, however, too bad. He was mostly as well received in the provinces as in Paris. He made his writ run throughout the country, and successfully surmounted the biggest obstacle to the authority of the state by insisting on the incorporation of the Resistance militias into the regular army. He established a coalition government, including two Communists, but presided over it with an icy discipline rather than a democratic camaraderie. In 1945 he was excluded from the Yalta and Potsdam conferences but given, thanks to Churchill’s pressure on Roosevelt, an occupation zone in Germany and a permanent seat on the UN Security Council. In spite of these concessions he continued to provoke his more powerful allies. He refused an invitation to meet Roosevelt in Algiers on the President’s last journey back to the United States. And two months after Roosevelt’s death Churchill was telling Truman that de Gaulle was ‘the worst enemy of France in her troubles’ and ‘one of the greatest dangers to European peace’.
Nineteen forty-five also brought victory, but that for de Gaulle was no more than a postscript to the Liberation. In addition it brought the re-emergence of party politics in France. De Gaulle wished to be above them and in July took the decision not to field candidates for the October elections to a new Assembly that was not only to control the government but to frame a new constitution for a new Republic. This Constituent Assembly, in which the Communists were the largest party but were closely followed by the new MRP (which was loosely but not loyally Gaullist) and they by the Socialists, proceeded in November unanimously to elect de Gaulle President of the Government, but then to spend the remaining six weeks of the year in ensuring that he had as little power as possible. The Fourth Republic, just as much as the Third, was to be dominated by the shifting alliances of a legislative chamber which neither the head of state nor the head of government had power to dissolve. This was wholly contrary to de Gaulle’s ideas, and his mind began to move towards resignation, a destination at which it arrived on 20 January 1946.
His resignation statement was brief, in a way brutal for it set out the alternative with an almost unnecessary starkness, yet it was essentially unchallenging, for it deliberately turned away from ‘a general on a white horse’ scenario. ‘The exclusive regime of the political parties has returned. I condemn it. But, unless I use force to set up a dictatorship, which I do not desire, and which would doubtless come to a bad end, I have no means of preventing this experiment. So I must retire.’
He did not want a coup. But he certainly expected more dismay at his departure than was manifested. The politicians, even the MRP, did not mind. Nor, it appeared, did the public. And France’s allies were rather relieved. Colombey-les-Deux-Eglises was not rehabilitated until five months later, and de Gaulle at first merely went to Marly in the royal forests of the Ile-de-France. His proximity to Paris led to no press of crowds to draw him back. In June he began his nearly twelve years of retreat in the Haute Marne. They were, however, divided sharply into two parts. Until 1953 he endeavoured to come back to power through the RPF (Rally of the French People), the programme for which he had outlined at Bayeux nine months earlier and the launch of which he proclaimed at Strasbourg in April 1947. His choice of locations was fully exploitative of his reputation: the Norman town where he had first re-mingled with the French people at the beginning of the Liberation and the Alsatian city that he had saved from reoccupation by the Germans in rough encounters with Eisenhower and Churchill as a consequence of the last Ardennes flourish of the Third Reich at the end of 1944.
He became neither the first nor the last man to use the back-cloth of national glories for partisan political purposes. What was more surprising was that he did so with only modified success. His rallies were commanding, perhaps a little too much so for democratic taste, but his supporters were not entirely satisfactory, too few of his left-of-centre adherents of London days and too many of those who had been content to go along with Vichy, and a feeling that more than at any other stage of his career he was being driven towards the shores of reaction. The electoral performance followed a pattern sometimes experienced by new political movements. Seven months after its launch the RPF polled 40 per cent in municipal elections. But municipal elections do not determine political destiny. When the next national elections came the RPF was down to 21.5 per cent of the vote. This gave them 120 seats in the Assembly. But what were they to do with them? Eventually half their deputies decided they wanted to play the game of parliamentary power broking and drifted out of the General’s control and into successive Fourth Republican governments.
That was effectively the end of the RPF, which had throughout been one of the less glorious chapters of de Gaulle’s career. For the remaining five years before his return to power he was in almost full retreat at Colombey. He worked at his memoirs, and the first two volumes appeared to great acclaim in October 1956 and June 1958. He tried one more political manifestation. In May 1954 on the feast of Joan of Arc he announced that he would appear at the Étoile and lay a wreath on the tomb of the Unknown Soldier, and implicitly invited a mass silent demonstration. It was not a success. As he got into his car after the ceremony he murmured ‘Le peuple n’est pas tellement là.’ He gave only one press conference in four years, his very occasional speeches were commemorative rather than political, and his solitude was broken only by occasional visits from faithful adherents, Courcel, Guichard, Debré, Malraux, or, still less frequently, from one of two more independent politicians - Mendés-France, for example, for whom he had a certain regard.
The flame of his hope of a return must have flickered very low as the years advanced - he was sixty-seven in the autumn of 1957 - and his body was manifestly ageing. This sense of time running out may have pushed him to sail as close as he did to the shores of illegality, and even of disrepute, on the route by which he came back to power. He did not mount a military coup and therefore did not directly contradict his abnegatory dictum of January 1946. But he allowed the explicit threat of a military rebellion in Algiers, and the implicit threat that it would spread to Paris, to destroy the Pflimlin Government, the last of the Fourth Republic, and to cause both Pflimlin and President Coty to seek a legal transfer of power to de Gaulle. Until this was secure de Gaulle declined to curb the rebellious generals. On the contrary he heightened the tension by referring to ‘the collapse of the state’ and announcing his own readiness to assume once more, as in June 1940, ‘the powers of the Republic’. If this did not happen, he would leave the regime to die in the ditch of its own weakness.
Coty was convinced that de Gaulle was the only alternative to civil war and determined to commission him as Prime Minister. There were still difficulties with the political groups. The Socialists were the key. De Gaulle received the two most prominent, Mollet, the Premier of the Suez adventure, and Vincent Auriol, President of the Republic from 1947 to 1954, at Colombey and persuaded them of his attachment to Republican democracy. Nevertheless, they were able to carry the Socialist parliamentary group by only seventy-seven votes to seventy-four. The majority of the minority then accepted group discipline and with it de Gaulle was endorsed in an Assembly vote by 329 to 224 with thirty-two abstentions. The margin was not vast, particularly in view of the Socialist ‘block vote’. The meat the Assembly had been required to swallow was, however, very strong. The next day it had to vote special powers for t
he new head of government to restore order in Algeria and in France and to draw up a new constitution, and then put itself into recess, at one of the most critical moments in the history of post-war France, for four and a half months. Once elected, de Gaulle’s democratic behaviour was almost as impeccable as he had managed to convince Mollet and Auriol that it would be, but the methods by which he came to power remain less admirable. It is rare for so much that is respectable and desirable to come out of such an ambiguous beginning.
De Gaulle was Prime Minister for seven months, and then, with a new constitution approved in a referendum by a 79 per cent positive vote, President for ten years and four months. During this too-long reign his popular support varied enough for him to contemplate resignation on at least two occasions, but until 1969 it was never insufficient for survival. Although the Fifth Republic was based on a great tilt of power from the legislature to the executive there was not at first a directly elected presidency. De Gaulle was elected in December 1958 by 78 per cent of the votes in college of a few thousand notables. A month before that the new Gaullist organization had won two-fifths of the seats in the Assembly and had no difficulty in finding enough parliamentary allies to provide a majority. Then in 1962 de Gaulle decided to strengthen the presidency by moving to direct election. This was opposed by a majority of the Assembly which carried a vote of censure. De Gaulle ordered both a referendum and a dissolution of the Assembly. The former produced a ‘yes’ vote of 62 per cent, which, however, he regarded as disappointing, being not quite a half of the total electorate. The parliamentary elections none the less gave for the first time a small absolute Gaullist majority of seats.
The first presidential elections under the new system did not take place for another three years and then, ironically, gave a much less satisfactory result for its instigator than had the old system in 1959. He started in an apparently commanding position, but was placed en ballotage by the combined votes of his two opponents, Mitterrand and Lecanuet. On the first round de Gaulle got 44 per cent against 32 per cent for Mitterrand and 16 per cent for Lecanuet. On the second he got 54.5 per cent against Mitterrand’s 45.5 per cent. It was decisive but not glorious. Then in the spring of 1967 the Gaullists lost their independent majority in the Assembly.
The next significant elections were the legislative ones of June 1968. They followed the disastrous month of May, when student riots eliding into industrial unrest led to the collapse of de Gaulle’s nerve and to his putting on a very passable imitation of Louis XVI’s flight to Varennes. Louis XVI got only to the edge of Champagne by coach but de Gaulle got to Baden-Baden by helicopter, where, according to General Massu and to some extent to Lacouture following Massu, it required a bracing lecture from Massu, one of the old Algiers junta of 1958, promoted to commander of the French occupation forces in Germany, to turn him round. It was amazing in view of the far more awesome dangers de Gaulle had faced in 1940 and afterwards that he should have cracked so badly. Maybe it was a classic example of the rule that nobody is much good in his second decade of continuous office (it was actually his 120th month). Maybe Massu exaggerated his own role and de Gaulle always intended the retreat to Baden-Baden as a tactic that would give him the advantage of surprise on the rebound. Whatever the reason, he returned fortified, and with his return there was a dramatic and favourable reversal of the situation. One result of this reaction was the electoral triumph of a month later. The Gaullists moved to a substantial absolute majority, but de Gaulle himself remained wounded and vulnerable. Ten months afterwards, when he forced an unnecessary referendum on a couple of minor ill-matched and unpersuasive constitutional questions, he lost by a margin of 5 per cent and resigned within six hours.
There is no close link between the fluctuating combination of daring, vision and irresponsibility that marked de Gaulle’s performance as President and these ups and downs of electoral fortune. He was consistent in working always for the greater glory of France, but by no means predictable in the means he employed to this end. He loved coups de théâtre and the surprise of paradox. Perhaps he remained a natural tank commander who believed that the unexpected approach was half the battle. Out of government he had opposed European integration and the Treaty of Rome. In office he found that Pflimlin, the man of Strasbourg who was later to be President of the European Parliament, had sent Maurice Faure, a great orator of the European cause, round the capitals of the other five original members to warn them that France could not meet the 1 January 1959 deadline for the dismantling of customs barriers. By December 1958 he was able to reverse that policy of hesitant weakness and say that France, after all, would be ready. His devaluation and subsequent stabilization of the franc made France fit to participate in and to benefit from the Common Market.
Then he achieved an almost mystical rapprochement with Adenauer and laid the foundations of the Franco-German partnership which was to lead Europe for the next thirty years. In early 1963 he scuppered Macmillan and displeased Italy, Benelux and half the German Government, but not Adenauer, by consigning Britain to le grand large. And in 1965, with Adenauer gone, he brought the first phase of the Common Market to a juddering halt with his quarrel with Hallstein, the presumptuous (as he thought) German President of the Commission.
His Algerian policy was both a greater reversal of alliances and his most signal presidential service to France. The conditions for his coming to power had been created by a cabal of generals who thought that the politicians of the Fourth Republic were hopelessly wet in their weak underpinning of the permanence of Algérie Française, and over the next four years he proceeded to show that they were indeed hopelessly wet because they would never have had the courage to sever the link and get the poison of la sale guerre out of the veins of France. De Gaulle did precisely this, and in the course of doing so employed one of the most memorable ambiguities in the history of politics. When he looked at the hysterical crowd of pieds noirs outside the Governement- Général in Algiers on the evening of 4 June 1958 and said ‘Je vous ai compris,’ it was interpreted as a commitment of support, may well have been delivered with mixed emotions at the time, but turned out to be a disdainful dismissal.
Freed of the incubus of Algeria and responding unexpectedly well to the stimulus of the Common Market, France enjoyed a period of rapid growth, currency stability and mounting prosperity in which much of the work done by Monnet’s Commissariat du Plan under the Fourth Republic redounded to the credit of the Fifth. But it was due to de Gaulle that its benefits did not drain away into the sands of Algeria and that the new France had the political panache to turn the economic success into international influence. At first de Gaulle, while preaching against too much subservience to an American-dominated NATO, played a hard cold war hand at moments of crisis. When the Berlin Wall was built in 1961 he was the only Western leader in favour of reacting with force. In 1962 when Kennedy confronted Khrushchev in the Cuban missile crisis he was more forthright in his support than either Macmillan or Adenauer. From 1963 onwards, however, with the Algerian war behind him and with the Khrushchev threat greatly reduced after Cuba, he began to take an increasingly anti-American line: on Vietnam; on the growing weakness of the dollar, which made the United States’ assumption of currency hegemony increasingly intolerable; on the nuclear test ban treaty; on the independent cultivation of relations with both China and the Soviet satellites; and on the attempt to build up a special French position in South America.
On some of these points de Gaulle was more sensible than Washington. But in his last years of power he began to go over several tops. Nineteen sixty-seven was a vintage year. In June, at the time of the Six-Day War, he switched from the traditional French pro-Israeli line and half-denounced the Jews as ‘an élite people, self-confident and dominating’. In July he went to Canada and proclaimed le Québec libre from the balcony of the Montreal City Hall. His visit had to be cut short before he got to Ottawa. In September he went to Poland and there made remarks almost as offensive to the Soviet Union as his
Quebec ones had been both to Ottawa and to Washington. In October he was actively supporting the Biafran revolt against the Nigerian Government, a policy that was regarded as hostile in both London and Washington. In November he dismissed Britain’s second application to join the European Community before the negotiations had even opened. Later that same month he encouraged his Chief of Defence Staff to announce that the French nuclear deterrent would be à tous azimuts, in other words targeted in all directions, including America. (No French missile could have begun to reach there, but that introduced bathos rather than moderation into the proposition; tous azimuts did, however, help to give the French deterrent support from all directions, including the Communist Party, within France.)
Inside as well as outside France ‘the shipwreck of old age’ was felt to be beginning. He was seventy-seven, much younger than Adenauer had been at the end of his Chancellorship but wearing less well. And so it proved to be. The year of 1968 was downhill nearly all the way; 1969 was a year of defeat and resignation, followed by six weeks of retreat in Ireland and a coldly unhelpful attitude towards the presidency of Georges Pompidou, who had been his Prime Minister throughout six years of great Fifth Republican success. Nineteen seventy brought almost complete solitude (except for the company of his wife) at Colombey, rather hasty work on his second and post-1958 series of memoirs, and sudden death, at an age two weeks short of eighty, on 9 November. ‘France is a widow,’ said Pompidou in what was probably the best phrase of his life. He could not compete with de Gaulle in that or many other respects, but nor could any other figure of the mid-twentieth century, except for his two old enemies/allies, Churchill and Roosevelt.
