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June 20 - August 31, 2025
To meet this challenge Pope Leo XIII had in 1891 issued his encyclical Rerum Novarum which enjoined industrialists to show social responsibility to their workers. Rerum Novarum was the foundational text of social Catholicism, a strand of Catholicism influential among the industrial bourgeoisie of northern France – the milieu of de Gaulle’s maternal grandparents.12
The most committed supporters of the doctrine of association would come to call themselves ‘left Gaullists’.
This background explains the triumph of the RPF at the municipal elections of October 1947. Obtaining 40 per cent of the vote – a stunning result for a movement that had not existed six months earlier – it won control of thirteen of the largest cities in France including Paris (where de Gaulle’s brother Pierre became the chair of the municipal council), Bordeaux (where Jacques Chaban-Delmas, who had been de Gaulle’s military delegate to Paris in 1944, became mayor), Marseilles, Lille and Strasbourg. The
reality de Gaulle had disastrously overplayed his hand. He certainly would have been swept to power in the event of parliamentary elections. But his problem was that there was no constitutional reason for these to take place just because the RPF had won municipal elections. All would depend on whether France’s politicians held their nerve. No one was more worried, but also no one was more determined, than Vincent Auriol, the President of the Republic.
With his encouragement, one of the leaders of the Socialist Party, Guy Mollet, called for all true ‘republicans’ to rally in defence of democracy. This was an appeal for the parties of the centre (essentially the MRP) and moderate left (Socialists) to swallow their differences against the two extremes of the PCF and the RPF.
Out of this was born the so-called ‘Third Force’ coalition that would govern France for the next three years. Although the MRP and the Socialists were the ballast of the Third Force, a vital role was also played by a number of small centrist parliamentary groups whose political importance was out of all proportion to their actual numbers, as often happens in coalition politics.
In November 1948, the RPF did well at the elections to the indirectly elected Senate. The main casualty was the MRP. This led its leaders to wonder if association with the Socialists in the Third Force was becoming an electoral liability and causing its voters to defect to the RPF.
It surmounted the challenge of another serious wave of Communist strikes in the autumn of 1948, when the Socialist Minister of the Interior Jules Moch did not hesitate to deploy riot police to restore order. Who needed de Gaulle if Queuille’s government was able to see off the Communist threat?
The RPF was not just a one-man show. It was run by a small Executive Committee that met every week; a National Committee of about 150 members that met once a month; a network of regional delegates who gathered in Paris regularly under de Gaulle’s chairmanship; and an annual congress (dubbed ‘Assizes’ to make it sound as if the RPF were not really a political party).
Apart from de Gaulle, the two key figures of the RPF were its Secretary General, Jacques Soustelle, in charge of organization, and André Malraux, in charge of propaganda.
Pompidou, who was a shrewd judge, observed: ‘Around a man like de Gaulle there are necessarily intrigues, clans, struggles to win favour. And the General helps a bit by stoking the rivalries.’43
For the rank-and-file Companions of the RPF, these shifts of policy were not important. The essence of the movement for them lay in the mass meetings where they experienced their collective communion with de Gaulle. In the first two years of the RPF’s existence, these meticulously choreographed rallies attracted crowds on a scale matched by no other political party – except occasionally the Communists.
The massive RPF rallies became less frequent after 1949. They were expensive to organize and it became harder to attract such enormous crowds once the sense of crisis had subsided. But in
de Gaulle subjected himself to the tedium of these regional tours, it was partly to escape the routine of Colombey. Before 1940, Colombey had played only an intermittent part in his life; now it was his only home.
On the anniversary of Anne’s death, every year the curé would come to the house to say a Mass in her memory. For both parents, Colombey was now a place of sadness from which they were happy to escape.
‘There are only two motors to human action, fear and vanity,’ de Gaulle told Pompidou in one of his Le Bon moments: ‘Either there is a state of catastrophe and then fear dominates. Or there is calm and then it is vanity.’
Although de Gaulle conceived the RPF as standing above the left–right divide, it had assumed a markedly conservative identity in the anti-Communist conjuncture of its birth. Its electors included many former Pétainists who would have execrated de Gaulle at the Liberation.
The electoral prospects of the RPF were compromised when in 1951 the parties of the Third Force concocted an electoral law whose purpose was to crush the two parties of the extremes – the PCF and RPF. The law allowed parties to form joint lists (apparentements), and ruled that any list obtaining a majority of the vote would automatically be allocated all seats.
In another speech, on 1 May, he announced that ‘when the people have spoken I will be there for them. Where? On the Champs-Elysées.’93 Such comments were designed to keep up the spirits of the more activist members of the RPF, but they allowed de Gaulle’s opponents to revive the accusation that he was an insurrectionist, even a ‘neo-fascist’.
The RPF emerged from the elections as the largest group in parliament with 119 seats but short of the 200 seats needed for an absolute majority. The apparentements system had worked: with 22 per cent of the vote the RPF obtained only 19 per cent of the seats. But even without the law the RPF would have got only 143 seats.
On 6 March 1952, twenty-seven members of the RPF parliamentary group broke ranks and voted for a government headed by the conservative politician Antoine Pinay. Auriol’s plan to split the RPF had succeeded.
The meeting ruled that députés must in future respect party discipline or leave. Twenty-seven députés resigned, and were immediately excluded from the RPF. Others joined them over the next few months.
It was increasingly difficult to discern the raison d’être of the RPF. De Gaulle’s intention when founding it had certainly not been to find himself managing – even at one remove – a parliamentary group. He had a shrewd sense of political power but not the skills or inclination to play this kind of game. Soustelle was not alone in finding him increasingly intolerable to work for.
The municipal elections of April 1953, six years after the triumph of 1947, were a disaster for the RPF. The movement lost about half the seats it had gained at its peak in 1947. De Gaulle could take no more. He issued a statement on 6 May 1953 announcing that any députés elected under his banner in 1951 would be free to enjoy the ‘poisons and delights of the system’ but they would no longer be doing it in the name of the RPF.
Although de Gaulle eventually devoted only twelve lines of his Memoirs to the RPF, it had occupied seven years of his life – more than the Free French. Why this refusal to wind up the organization when it had obviously failed?
The idea of a supranational ‘European’ army sponsored by the Americans, and supported from the sidelines by the British, was anathema to de Gaulle. On
Dien Bien Phu did spark a major governmental crisis, but its beneficiary turned out to be not de Gaulle but Pierre Mendès France, his old collaborator. Mendès France had not been a minister since his resignation from de Gaulle’s government in 1945. But
Mendès France
His style had made him in some sense a kind of left-wing de Gaulle; his fall seemed further proof that the ‘system’ was dysfunctional; and many disappointed ‘Mendésistes’ would later rally to de Gaulle in the same way as some disappointed Gaullists had rallied to Mendès in 1954.
For de Gaulle, the burial of the EDC meant that the RPF had lost its last remaining raison d’être. In December 1954, he announced that the movement was over. The members of the former RPF group in parliament renamed themselves the Social Republicans.
One constantly repeated theme of this volume is how that ‘communion’, the ‘shared emotion’, the ‘frisson of unanimity’ characterizing de Gaulle’s encounters with the French is increasingly poisoned by the ‘academies’, ‘elites’, ‘assemblies’ and ‘parties’ who interpose themselves between the Saviour-Guide and his People. This sense of disillusion culminates in de Gaulle’s resignation in 1946.
is easy to see why de Gaulle so identified with Chateaubriand, who had like him been born into a legitimist family and had adapted to the modern world, describing himself as ‘between two centuries as at the confluence of two rivers’. As a young man, Chateaubriand had been presented at the court of Louis XVI and he had died during the Revolution of 1848.
With de Gaulle in ‘retirement’, the Gaullists dispersed. Pompidou joined the Rothschild bank; Malraux returned to writing his interminable book on the history of art; Palewski became Ambassador to Rome.
Social Republicans
On the margins of this inner circle was Michel Debré, who had become closer to de Gaulle than in the early days of the RPF. Although he was an elected Gaullist senator – which did not endear him to de Gaulle – he refused to participate in any Fourth Republic government – which did.
Comte de Paris,
Prince Napoleon,
Mendès France made it clear at once that Algeria was different from Indo-China: Algeria, he declared, is ‘France’. His Interior Minister, François Mitterrand, said the same: ‘Algeria is France and the only negotiation is war.’ War it was to be.
As he wrote in the 1930s, the action of soldiers was never enough to change a regime unless ‘general opinion has moved in favour of an overthrowing of the established order’.4 In 1958, however, there was reason to believe such a moment was close.
De Gaulle was especially gnomic when on the next day he received Albert Camus, who was increasingly anguished by the situation in Algeria, torn between his own pied noir background and his liberal politics. The two men had never met before and Camus was left perplexed by de Gaulle’s affectation of phlegmatic cynicism.
The next day, de Gaulle saw Raymond Triboulet, leader of the rump of Gaullist députés in parliament. Triboulet’s information was that President Coty would approach de Gaulle to form a government if Gaillard failed to resolve the Sakhiet crisis.
President Coty started the usual round of consultations to form the next government. The mood of the Europeans of Algiers was increasingly febrile. They feared that any new government might be ready to compromise on the future of French Algeria.
Delbecque also succeeded in winning over Alain de Sérigny, editor of the most influential Algiers newspaper. As a former Pétainist, Sérigny had no love for de Gaulle but he was now persuaded that only de Gaulle could save Algérie française.
Pierre Lagaillarde
At this point, Delbecque, who had been wrongfooted by these events, arrived on the scene and managed to have himself appointed vice-president of the Committee. This gave the Gaullists a foot in the door, and Delbecque now worked to win the Committee over to the idea of calling on de Gaulle.
On the morning of 15 May, Salan addressed the crowds from the balcony of the Government General in the Forum. He assured them that Algeria would remain French and ended with a rousing cry of ‘Vive la France! Vive l’Algérie!’
Salan’s priorities were to preserve the unity of the army and to keep Algeria French.
In 1958, the choice was between a military coup on the right or a Popular Front alliance with the Communists on the left.
On 27 June 1958, a month after returning to power, de Gaulle gave a televised address to the nation: ‘I call for Unity! That means I call on everybody. It was very dark yesterday! But this evening there is light! Françaises, Français, I need your help.’1
It took time for people to realize what was happening. To those living through them, these years did not initially seem so ‘glorious’. About 25 per cent of electors regularly voted for the Communist Party, which was still propagating the ludicrous theory that the working class was becoming ‘pauperized’. Whether or not any Communist voter really believed this, it was true that economic growth had not immediately translated into higher living standards.
