A Certain Idea of France: The Life of Charles de Gaulle

by Julian T. Jackson

He alighted upon M’ba’s young directeur de cabinet Albert Bongo whom he thought could be groomed appropriately. Bongo was summoned to Paris for a kind of tutorial with de Gaulle to test if he was up to the job.78 When M’ba died, the transition took place smoothly. For better or worse – usually worse – Bongo ruled Gabon for the next forty years (and his son still rules today).

The relationship worked because in the end they were pursuing the same objectives. De Gaulle translated the base metal of Foccart’s dirty tricks into rhetorical gold, but like the cynically conservative hero of Lampedusa’s novel The Leopard, they agreed on the essential: in Africa everything had to change so that everything could stay the same.

De Gaulle’s first televised speech on 13 June 1958 was not a success. He refused to wear make-up, and every wrinkle and blemish was visible. Reading through thick glasses, he looked down at his script rather than at the camera. This performance was watched with appalled incredulity by the publicity magnate Marcel Bleustein-Blanchet, a former member of the Free French.

This interest in television made de Gaulle a politician in advance of his time. Debré hardly watched television and was too hectoring to be effective on the small screen; Pompidou did not even own a television when he became premier and listened to de Gaulle on the radio.29

Over the years there was an increasing proportion of graduates (11 per cent in 1959 and 20 per cent in 1966) from the Ecole Nationale d’Administration (ENA), that training school for civil servants set up by de Gaulle’s government at the Liberation. Few conseillers had any previous Gaullist affiliations and they were recruited for their technical competence.

De Gaulle usually saw his Prime Minister once a week for a private meeting, and also briefly before the weekly Council of Ministers.

The stabilization plan was widely criticized in the press for being too deflationary. Probably the plan did no major harm, but the affair casts interesting light on how government operated under de Gaulle.

Policies were thus a balance of influence between Matignon and the Elysée – except on defence and foreign policy where de Gaulle was entirely dominant.73

De Gaulle’s decisive personal intervention to impose the financial stabilization plan belies the often repeated claim that he was uninterested in economics. Indeed he was intermittently obsessed by it.

Since Colbert, minister of Louis XIV, France has had a cult of the allegedly disinterested public servant working for the state. The nineteenth-century socialist thinker Saint-Simon developed an entire philosophy around the idea of a society governed harmoniously by an elite. The French word fonctionnaire is imbued with an almost sacred aura inadequately conveyed by the British translation ‘civil servant’.

The politics of this generation of fonctionnaires was broadly left of centre, but they preferred to see themselves as apolitically working for a notion of the public good.

One feature of de Gaulle’s first government was the relatively large number of posts given in his governments to non-political ‘experts’ and civil servants over elected politicians. In January 1959, there were eight ‘experts’ to twenty politicians; a year later the ratio was almost equal.

A notable feature of government under de Gaulle was the setting up of ad hoc commissions or para-political organisms operating outside the more bureaucratic routines of the traditional administration. One of these was given responsibility for scientific research – a particular obsession of de Gaulle’s – and another for regional development (DATAR).

was out of this convergence between modernizers, forces vives and de Gaulle that the Gaullism of the 1960s was shaped.90 Nothing better illustrates this than the quiet revolution taking place in the French countryside during the 1960s.

This was also implausible – after all, France had a free press – and they settled finally on the idea that Gaullism was the reactionary instrument of ‘monopoly capitalism’ (Pompidou’s previous banking career came in useful here). Other Marxists tried to develop a more sophisticated approach, arguing that Gaullism represented the dynamic elements of French capitalism opposed to the backward-looking protectionist and rentier interests clinging on to Algeria.1 The Communist Party viewed this theory as heresy because it implied that Gaullism had a progressive side.

At various times, comparisons were made with the Consulate of Napoleon, the Orleanist monarchy of the 1830s and the parliamentary Empire of the 1860s. Some saw Gaullism as a modernizing technocracy, others as a new avatar of Maurrassianism.

The only significant intellectual to support de Gaulle was François Mauriac. Since the Liberation, Mauriac had become an icon for French progressives not only because of his role in the Resistance but because of his opposition to the abuses of French colonialism.

Mauriac finally broke with L’Express in 1961 and moved his column to Le Figaro, the newspaper of bourgeois conservative opinion. Here his Gaullism sat as uneasily as it had in L’Express because the newspaper’s readers had their own reservations about de Gaulle: most were nostalgic for Algérie française, many opposed de Gaulle’s anti-Americanism because they were anti-Communist, and some harboured residual admiration for Pétain.

effect America’s creditors were financing the penetration of their economies by American capital. This became an issue of public concern in France when in 1963 the Chrysler company purchased a controlling interest in the French car firm Simca.

This was not the first time de Gaulle had used the phrase ‘Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals’ and no one ever quite knew what he meant by it. But if these words meant anything at all, it was that de Gaulle was thinking of a rapprochement with the Soviet Union as the first step towards a solution of the problem of Germany. There

This was only a pyrrhic victory for Foccart. A few months later Tshombe was ousted. In November General Mobutu seized power and Tshombe fled the country again. De Gaulle commented to Foccart: ‘It is the revenge of the Belgians. Let us wait till Tshombe comes back’ – but he never did.

Mitterrand had long been one of de Gaulle’s most implacable opponents. His anti-Gaullism had deep roots stretching back to a first disastrous meeting in Algiers in December 1943. According to Mitterrand, de Gaulle’s opening conversational gambit had been to reprimand him for having arrived on a British plane.

In the Fourth Republic Mitterrand had been a key figure of the centrist UDSR. He was a minister in several governments and had the regime not collapsed in 1958 he would have stood a good chance of becoming premier very soon.

Mitterrand was initially stiff and ill at ease, and some viewers were put off by his wolfish smile, but his opening line struck a chord: ‘The General poses problems which concerned our fathers while I am posing problems which will concern our children.’ Mitterrand became more relaxed and experimented with a new format in which he was asked easy questions by a female journalist.

Prince Eugène:

These cat-and-mouse tactics were vintage de Gaulle. He so enjoyed being – or playing at being – Machiavellian that he may well not have had much idea himself of what he was intending to do. Were de Gaulle’s comments to Brosio about leaving the Alliance intended to cause such alarm that his allies would be relieved when he drew back from this extreme step?

Ion Maurer

The Middle East crisis had revealed the limits of French influence. De Gaulle’s call for a four-power conference had been ignored before the crisis – and had no more success after

Two months later, another crisis, sparked by de Gaulle’s visit to Quebec, caused equal consternation.

August 1940, a broadcast from London to the French Canadians had met with little response. Conservative, Catholic Quebec was more sympathetic to Pétain than to de Gaulle, who therefore felt no sentimental debt to the French Canadians.

Given how many Anglophone Canadians – and how few French Canadians – had died liberating France, de Gaulle’s invocation of the Liberation analogy was at the very least in bad taste.

For those on the left and centre who were pro-European and pro-Atlanticist, de Gaulle’s policies represented all that was most retrograde – a kind of ‘planetary Poujadism’, as Mitterrand put it nicely in parliament.

was predictable that de Gaulle was able to win the approval of the Communist Party for his anti-American positions, but his appeal to the left went beyond the Communists. In May 1966, twenty-nine prominent left-wing journalists and intellectuals signed a manifesto supporting de Gaulle’s foreign policy. They included Domenach, the editor of Esprit, who had been inching towards de Gaulle for several years, the Socialist André Philip, the former Trotskyist David Rousset.

Apart from occasional interventions such as the price stabilization plan in 1963, de Gaulle had been happy to leave the day-to-day running of domestic policy to Georges Pompidou. One sign of Pompidou’s growing authority was his insistence on reshuffling his government in 1966 after the Presidential election.

De Gaulle, always impressed by intellectual virtuosity, had a certain faiblesse for this arrogantly confident young technocrat. But he did not feel strongly enough to interfere when Pompidou wanted to move him. Giscard was replaced by Michel Debré, who re-entered the government after four years.

This offered an opening to a that curious group who called themselves ‘left Gaullists’. ORPHANS OF GAULLISM The left Gaullists were neither fish nor fowl – distrusted both by the left and by the Gaullists.

After the end of the Algerian War, the left Gaullists were no longer needed for this purpose, but in anticipation of the elections of 1962 de Gaulle saw them as a possible counterweight in parliament to Giscard’s Independent Republicans.

counted only to the extent that de Gaulle was ready to back their ideas. After 1966 it looked as if he might at last be ready to take them out of his top pocket. De Gaulle’s dream of class reconciliation was one of his most deeply held convictions.

At the start of 1963 there was a major miners’ strike which was badly mishandled by the government. De Gaulle had suffered a serious, if temporary, blip in his popularity. He drew the conclusion that the long-term solution was not just to pay the miners more but to change the entire relationship between workers and employers.

Article 16.

The conclusion Pompidou had drawn from the election was that it was urgent to transform the UNR into a modern political party rather than a collection of MPs without real electoral roots and no identity except support for de Gaulle. He was preparing for a future where Gaullism could exist without de Gaulle. To

De Gaulle was not enthusiastic about the reforms of Vatican II. Although he agreed it was necessary for the Church to end its ‘rejection of the modern world’, he worried that Pope John XXIII had been too influenced by a Vatican group who wanted to revolutionize everything:

The late 1950s and early 1960s were a period of extraordinary cultural and intellectual vitality in France. This was the heyday of the ‘new novel’ in literature, the ‘new wave’ in cinema, of thinkers like Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan.

The economic modernization of the 196os, which he celebrated in speech after speech, was also bringing in its wake challenges to traditional cultural values.

The issue of selection was very much on the agenda again in the first half of 1968, but Pompidou made it clear to Peyrefitte that he remained as opposed as he had ever been. It was he said a ‘hobbyhorse’ of Narbonne:

The knowledge that the government was planning to introduce measures of selection was one ingredient of student dissatisfaction at the start of 1968.

During the first week of the events, the Prime Minister had been absent in Afghanistan; during the second, the President was absent in Rumania. This trip had been long planned as part of de Gaulle’s détente strategy. Rumania was the country in the eastern bloc which most consistently showed signs of wanting to distance itself from the Soviet Union.

Sparked by the government’s indecisive response to the student protests, the strikes partly represented the sudden irruption into politics of the hundreds of thousands of new semi-skilled workers who had swelled the French labour force in the 1960s. Many of these were immigrants, or young men and women straight from the countryside; they had little in common with the traditional working class which formed the rank and file of the trade unions.

Although de Gaulle had his plan to resolve the crisis, he had also authorized Pompidou to start negotiations with the trade unions to end the strikes. Meanwhile – for ten days – Foccart had been working in his own way to solve the crisis. He began mobilizing his networks of former RPF activists. They set up Committees for the Defence of the Republic (CDRs) throughout France.

There were thus three Gaullist strategies in play to end the crisis: de Gaulle’s referendum, Pompidou’s negotiations, Foccart’s mobilization of the Gaullist base.