Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945

by Tony Judt

But like much else in De Gaulle’s pursuit of domestic modernization, notably Malraux’s ambitious plans to restore and clean all of France’s stock of historic public buildings, these changes were always part of a larger, political objective: the restoration of French grandeur. Like Spain’s General Franco (with whom he otherwise had nothing in common), De Gaulle understood economic stabilization and modernization largely as weapons in the struggle to restore national glory. France had been in steady decline at least since 1871, a grim trajectory marked by military defeat, diplomatic humiliation, colonial retreat, economic deterioration and domestic instability. De Gaulle’s goal was to close out the era of French decay. ‘All my life’, he wrote in his war memoirs, ‘I have had a certain idea of France’. Now he was to put it into effect. The French President’s chosen arena was foreign policy, an emphasis dictated by personal taste and raison d’état alike. De Gaulle had long been sensitive to France’s serial humiliation—less by its German foe in 1940 than at the hands of its Anglo-American allies ever since. De Gaulle never forgot his own embarrassing isolation as France’s impoverished and largely ignored spokesman in wartime London. His grasp of military reality kept him from expressing the pain that he shared with other Frenchmen at the British sinking of France’s proud Mediterranean fleet at Mers-el-Kebir in July 1940; but the symbolism of the act rankled nonetheless. De Gaull...