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October 13 - December 25, 2023
he could not accept the idea that France might surrender an iota of her military independence.
‘What’, de Gaulle once wrote, ‘have I tried to do except to lead the French by dreams?’ As a man of action who half yearned to be a writer, he was in some sense the mirror image of Chateaubriand, a writer who dreamt of being a man of action.
With de Gaulle in ‘retirement’, the Gaullists dispersed. Pompidou joined the Rothschild bank;
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. What made the case of Algeria so complicated was that administratively it was not a colony but part of France, as it had been ever since the French arrived there in 1830. In reality, however, the population of nine million Muslims did not enjoy equal rights with other French citizens. All attempts to introduce democratic reforms were subverted by the European population, popularly known as pieds noirs. The pieds noirs formed a
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In 1957, the army began systematically using torture to destroy the FLN. The tactic worked in the short term to weaken the FLN in the city of Algiers, but in France liberal opinion started to question the moral legitimacy of the policy. Algeria was seeping into every crevice of French politics.
74 It was the convergence of these two elements – pied noir anger and army discontent – that would eventually cause the fall of the Republic in 1958.
In 1958, the choice was between a military coup on the right or a Popular Front alliance with the Communists on the left. It was partly because he so mistrusted the Communists that Mollet had rallied to de Gaulle as a lesser evil. Although the politicians were not sure de Gaulle could be trusted to save them from the army, and the army was not sure de Gaulle could be trusted to save it from the politicians,
Most successful coups contain an element of legality. Mussolini came to power in 1922 less because of the ‘march on Rome’, which could easily have been stopped, than because the King chose to appoint him Prime Minister. The Italian elites no longer believed in their own system. The threat from the street in Italy in 1922 was probably less real than the threat from the military in Algeria in 1958.
De Gaulle’s skill was to have kept the Algerian rebellion simmering – so that he could force the politicians to accept his terms – but not exploding – to enable him to return to power legally.
The government had a police car tailing de Gaulle’s comings and goings from Colombey to Paris, but since his Citroën 15CV was faster than the police Peugeot 203 this attempt to monitor his movements was rather ineffective.60
once Mendès France had successfully extricated France from Indo-China in 1954, Fourth Republic governments started to pursue more imaginative colonial policies. Mendès France paved the way for Tunisia to claim independence in 1955, and his successor Edgar Faure did the same for Morocco.
But Algeria was viewed more as an internal French problem than as a colonial one
French commitment to ‘Europe’ was reinforced by the Suez crisis in 1956 when the French and British had been forced by the Americans to abandon their operation against Nasser. The French and British drew different conclusions from the disaster. The British government decided to consolidate ties with the United States, the French government to strengthen ties with Europe.
that the Soviets were pulling ahead of America technologically and also led Europeans to worry whether America would be willing to risk nuclear annihilation for Europe.
LOL, sure it's not the other way around??
Thus de Gaulle came to power at a critical juncture in the relationship between France, Europe and America.
Pied noir activists and army officers in the Committees of Public Safety were disappointed that de Gaulle’s government included so many Fourth Republic politicians (including Pflimlin, against whom their insurrection had been directed) but not their hero Soustelle (who had played a key role in the insurrection).
Alienating two of the most powerful lobbies in France – veterans and farmers – was a high-risk strategy.
The irony was that the logic of Soustelle’s progressive republicanism led him to defend any means – including torture – to keep Algeria French while de Gaulle’s pragmatic conservatism led him ultimately to accept Algerian independence.
In 1958, only a tiny minority supported Algerian independence. They included intellectuals of the extreme left, such as Jean-Paul Sartre, and lucid conservatives, of whom the most notable was Raymond Aron, who believed that the economic costs of holding on to Algeria were unsustainable.
De Gaulle also knew that many army leaders were totally committed to the American alliance and viewed the struggle in Algeria as part of an international crusade against Communism.36 In their view, any moves towards anti-Atlanticism would jeopardize any prospect of America supporting France in Algeria in the spirit of anti-Communism. This only reveals how the army leaders were living in a fantasy world: the truth was that the American government, keen to increase its support in the Arab world, was coming under increasing international pressure to support the cause of Algerian independence.
De Gaulle briefed Pompidou carefully: ‘The term independence is indifferent to us because in the present world it does not mean much except for propaganda. No state is independent because it is always in reality more or less linked to others’ (an ironic admission from a leader whose entire foreign policy was built around the idea of French independence). Pompidou was told that only two areas were out of bounds. First, the Sahara, with its important petrol reserves, was not to be considered part of Algeria. Secondly, if Algerian self-determination resulted in a complete break with France, the
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Some of the military later wondered if de Gaulle, the supreme Machiavellian, had had advance notice of the plans for a putsch and allowed it to go ahead as a means of finally breaking the resistance of the army.103 There is no evidence for this, but it is true that the coup had served de Gaulle’s purposes, up to a point.
The Sahara was of major economic importance since the discovery of oil in 1956, and it was also where the French tested their atomic weapons.
In retrospect we know that France was entering the countdown to final disengagement from Algeria, but to contemporaries it felt as if the country was sliding into civil war.117 The defeated putschists had formed a terrorist organization, the Organisation d’Action Secrète (OAS), ready to defend French Algeria to the bitter end. Their enemy was not so much the FLN as French ‘liberals’ and the French police.
the referendum in Algeria on independence. This took place on 1 July, at which point Algeria became officially independent.
at least the French government did its minimal duty to the pieds noirs by allowing them to come to France. This was not the case for the Harkis, those Algerian Muslims who had been drafted or volunteered as auxiliaries to serve with the French army. Most of them faced reprisals and almost certain death in Algeria. Of some 300,000 who had fought for France, fewer than one in ten found asylum in France.
De Gaulle’s ‘granting’ of Algerian independence, while avoiding civil war in France, is often counted as one of his greatest achievements. This judgement needs to be qualified. He did not ‘grant’ independence: it was wrested from him. And he only partially avoided civil war.
The Fourth Republic had struggled with Algeria for four years; de Gaulle, with all his prestige and all the powers at his disposal, struggled on for another four. De Gaulle’s achievement, then, was less to have ‘granted’ independence than to have persuaded people that that is what he had done; to make them believe that he had controlled the process; and to create a compelling narrative that explained France’s disengagement from Algeria and turned it into a victory rather than a defeat.
In his first Prime Minister, de Gaulle had found someone ready to immolate himself, and sacrifice his convictions regarding Algeria, on the altar of his personal loyalty. He had exhausted his usefulness; it was time to move on. As Debré’s successor, de Gaulle chose Georges Pompidou, who had served him so well behind the scenes on many occasions. Pompidou, who had nothing of the zealot about him, could not have been more different from his anxiously earnest predecessor
He told an American diplomat in 1962: ‘I did not want to be Prime Minister but we are living under a dictatorship and each person must do what he is ordered.’16 Debré would never have made a joke of this kind.
Having eased some of Adenauer’s worries at Rambouillet, de Gaulle presented him with a nine-point memorandum for the organization of Europe. It proposed regular meetings of European governments, prepared by joint commissions of experts from each country. In the longer term, it envisaged a consultative parliament of representatives from each national assembly. This was de Gaulle’s most ambitious attempt to circumvent the supranational institutions at Brussels by building a ‘political’ Europe.
de Gaulle had also mentioned the idea of building European defence. This was his real ambition.
Adenauer, who had seemed receptive to de Gaulle’s ideas about the future development of ‘political’ Europe, immediately had second thoughts.56 One problem was that the German Foreign Ministry, and German public opinion, were warier of de Gaulle
if de Gaulle was using Adenauer to wean Europe from America, the wily Adenauer was also partly using the threat of de Gaulle to extort greater commitments from the United States regarding the defence of Europe against the Soviet Union.
I regret that I spoke so frankly to Chancellor Adenauer. I thought him more European than he is in reality. Also tone down our opposition to Community organizations … If we succeed in giving birth to a Europe of cooperating States, the supranational Communities will ipso facto be put in their place.
Meeting him again in February 1961, he teased away at Adenauer’s doubts about the United States, insinuating that although the Americans seemed to care about Europe at the moment, it might one day ‘appear more foreign to them’ because of their obligations in other parts of the world.
Since the late 1940s the Americans had envisioned international relations as a ‘partnership’ where one partner was in fact supremely dominant. De Gaulle drew on a different model of international relations based around the idea of balance and equilibrium.
the British and American administrations developed their ‘Grand Designs’ to match de Gaulle’s. ‘Grand Design’ was the title of a remarkable document Macmillan drafted in January 1961. He had come to the view that the British, having failed to dilute the European Community from outside, would need to join it. To achieve de Gaulle’s support, he was ready to intercede with the American government to offer France nuclear cooperation. Once in Europe, his plan was that the British would work to counter the anti-American tendencies of the French. In July 1961, the British announced their intention to
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Gratitude, especially concerning relations between states, was not in de Gaulle’s repertoire.
Macmillan the patron had become Macmillan the supplicant.
England was France’s hereditary enemy and historic rival, but that memory was overlaid by a more recent one: a bewilderment that Britain had allowed herself to lose a sense of national ambition and become, in his eyes, an American satellite.
it would be a different Common Market that we would have to think of building and one that would be presented with problems in its economic relations with a host of other states, above all with the United States … It is predictable that the cohesion of all its members … would not last for very long, and that it would take on the appearance of a colossal Atlantic community under American dependence and direction. That is not at all what France aims to achieve, and is working to achieve, which is a strictly European construction.117 As he had predicted to Peyrefitte, de Gaulle had a lot of
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In relation to America, the tiniest incident could set de Gaulle off. Hearing that some American scientists had asked to be allowed into Polynesia to view an eclipse, he was immediately suspicious of their real motives: ‘You must not give anything to the Americans on the spot; refuse them everything, even if they ask us for a box of matches.’
As he grumbled privately: ‘The peasants are never happy. Either it is raining too much, or it is too dry, or too cold … We are always having to feel sorry for them.’92 Whenever farming organizations agitated for higher prices, de Gaulle exhorted Debré to be firm.93 The idea that the government was indifferent to the sufferings of the peasantry was the origin of the first accusations that Gaullism had been hijacked by inhuman technocracy.
Between 1958 and 1968 the numbers working in French agriculture fell by about 150,000 every year.
a controversial article for Le Monde in 1964 exploring the paradox that de Gaulle, despised by the French left, was becoming a hero in the Third World because of his willingness to stand up to America: ‘Fidel Castro’s only real competitor in popularity with the youth of Latin America is de Gaulle.’14
he ensured that France squeezed every possible economic benefit out of Europe through the Common Agricultural Policy. This was an area where French and German interests continued to diverge. France, as a major agricultural producer, wanted a protected European market; Germany, as an agricultural importer, wanted to buy on world markets where prices were lower.
levies paid by Germany on food imports were subsidizing French agriculture.
De Gaulle had always believed that the division of the world into two ideological blocs was contrary to the laws of history. Geopolitics would always trump ideology.
For de Gaulle, the ending of the division of the world into two blocs was not only inevitable but also desirable. Only a multipolar world would permit Europe – and therefore France – to become a player in world politics again.
