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June 20 - August 31, 2025
Daniel Cohn-Bendit
They included a 35 per cent increase in the minimum wage and a 10 per cent hike in the average wage. But when Georges Séguy, leader of the largest trade union, the Communist CGT, arrived to present the agreement to the workers of the massive Renault plant of Billancourt outside Paris, he was shouted down. This alarming development suggested that the unions could no longer control their own rank and file.
The students despised them as a retrograde force who were as out of touch as de Gaulle: the Marxism of the students was inspired by Mao and Castro, not by the grey bureaucratic leaders of the PCF.
Wednesday 29 May 1968 was the most extraordinary day of de Gaulle’s career. Most of the protagonists, believing they had lived through an historic day, wrote up their memories soon afterwards.
No appointment can have been more disagreeable to swallow than the choice of his arch-enemy René Capitant, the apostle of participation, as Minister of Justice. Like many other left Gaullists, Capitant had been destabilized by the events of May. When the opposition presented a motion of censure against the Pompidou government on 19 May, he had announced that, as a Gaullist, he would have to vote with the opposition.
After the second round, the Gaullist party, which had rechristened itself Union pour la Défense de la République (UDR), won 293 parliamentary seats, giving it a substantial overall majority, something never previously achieved by any single party in the history of French democracy. But whose victory was it?
For all the disappointments of his visits to Poland and Rumania, de Gaulle had remained optimistic about the longer-term validity of his détente policy.
But in 1968 the real threat to Soviet authority came from Czechoslovakia. And the Soviets’ response showed they were not necessarily ready to play the ‘good guys’ if their interests were threatened.
From Colombey, Couve de Murville and Debré, who had replaced Couve as Foreign Minister in the new government, concocted a communiqué with de Gaulle condemning the invasion. Two
Blaming Germany for what had happened in Prague was de Gaulle’s way of explaining the failure of détente that had been the linchpin of his foreign policy for the last three years. It reveals more about his fluctuating views of Germany than about the real reasons for the Soviet action.
The origin of the Soames Affair was a request by the newly appointed British Ambassador, Christopher Soames (son-in-law of Churchill), for a private meeting with de Gaulle to explore ways of improving relations between the two countries.
Couve de Murville, a caricature of the soulless civil servant, did not have the political skills to calm the fronde of the Gaullist rank and file in parliament. Their king over the water was Pompidou, who was loudly cheered when he made his first appearance in the Chamber in June.
On 1–2 March, de Gaulle received the newly elected President of the United States, Richard Nixon. This encounter could hardly have been more cordial. It was helped by the improvement of Franco-American relations since the Soviet invasion of Prague, but Nixon had always been an admirer of de Gaulle as a supreme exponent of Realpolitik.
Pompidou also went through the motions of defending the referendum publicly to cover himself against accusations that he had sabotaged de Gaulle’s chances. On 14 April, Giscard d’Estaing announced that he would be voting ‘no’.
At midnight, the Elysée issued a communiqué de Gaulle had written several days earlier: ‘I am ceasing to exercise my functions as President of the Republic. This decision takes effect today at midday.’ Those were his last public words.
His decision to pay his respects to Franco shocked Mauriac and Malraux, both of whom had been committed to the defence of the Spanish Republic in the 1930s. This showed how little at some level they understood de Gaulle.
What prevented de Gaulle succumbing to paralysing depression was his belief that he had one final mission to perform: writing a second set of memoirs to cover the years of his Presidency. He saw this as his political testament – like that of Richelieu – which would be an inspiration to future generations.
It is particularly striking how quickly the left started to invoke de Gaulle’s memory. This too he had predicted in a conversation with the left Gaullist David Rousset in April 1968: ‘The left does not forgive me for having carried out the policy it ought to have done and was not able to do … It will only pardon me after my death. After my death it will reclaim me.
The non-Communist left moved towards de Gaulle a little later. In 1981, François Mitterrand was elected to the Presidency. Hating de Gaulle was the only consistent thread to his devious political trajectory.
Ironically, at the same time as de Gaulle’s myth was taking off, his narrative about French history – and his role in it – was progressively unravelling.
One of de Gaulle’s achievements had been to turn France’s defeat in Algeria into a kind of victory. Apart from the pieds noirs the French seemed to be happy to buy into this. De Gaulle’s narrative was that France, although militarily victorious, had granted Algeria independence in accordance with her historic commitment to human rights.
But there was much that de Gaulle did not get right. His social ideas regarding class reconciliation and the challenges of industrial civilization – still celebrated by some ‘left’ Gaullists as one of his most important legacies – were as half-baked as they were generous:
His thinking on these matters was in the spirit of many social Catholics of his generation and of some 1930s’ intellectuals. But there is no sign that he had any understanding of the massive structural changes that were affecting the French economy in the 1960s.
And with someone who was regularly capable of referring to himself in the third person or saying (if half in jest) ‘I have been saying it for a thousand years,’ one is tempted to adapt to de Gaulle Jean Cocteau’s quip about Victor Hugo, that he was a ‘madman who believed he was Victor Hugo’. But
Or as Henry Kissinger once put it: ‘De Gaulle’s nationalism is in the tradition of Mazzini … His diplomacy is in the style of Bismarck.’
But de Gaulle’s most lasting achievement was not so much in the field of foreign policy as in the establishment of the constitution of the Fifth Republic in 1958.
than the institution of the election of the President by universal suffrage.29 Gaullism succeeded in becoming the synthesis of French political traditions, or as de Gaulle put it, reconciling the left to the state and the right to the nation, the left to authority and the right to democracy.
Maritain, as we have seen, had been himself reticent about de Gaulle between 1940 and 1942, and he was never a fully paid-up Gaullist. But in November 1942 he had no doubt where duty lay, and why de Gaulle had to be chosen over Darlan or Giraud: There are men who from the time of the armistice have endured the worst trials to continue that war by the side of the allies – I speak of the soldiers of the Free French … Their leader said no to the enemy from the first day; an act of that kind cannot be effaced. A sort of heroic chivalry has given back hope to the French.32
