from Jonathan Fenby “The General Charles De Gaulle and the France he saved” Simon & Schuster 2010.

1958 – Algeria

‘ In a bravura performance in the spring of 1958, he mixed force, nerve, fear, bluff, charm and a readiness to make concessions in his second great historic performance in defence of the nation. His strategy was simple, but extremely hard to execute as he insisted on taking a legal route back to office, but let those in authority imagine him heading a military coup, thus frightening the establishment into acquiescence. ‘

In power again:

‘ For all the hauteur de Gaulle demonstrated, past experience reinforced his taste for secrecy, guile, ambiguity and duplicity. He was at one and the same time the most straightforward of politicians in his ultimate aims, and among the most tricky in the way he proceeded towards them, an Olympian who adopted wily, crab-like tactics. He excelled at pursuing two courses simultaneously, only making his intentions clear when he judged the moment right – or when he had made up his mind. ‘

Aftermath of Algeria: – re Muslims who had worked for the French – in particular members of the harki militia.

‘ in other cases men were reported to have been boiled alive or emasculated. Those harkis who managed to get out of Algeria found themselves crammed into unsanitary camps in Provence, treated by the French state as the detritus of a struggle people wanted to forget. To this day, they agitate for proper recognition of their past services but Paris, mindful of relations with Algiers, prefers to ignore them, just as the majority of the French people prefer to forget about the long, poisonous struggle across the Mediterranean.’

 

1966 – giving it to the Americans

‘ He did not want US troops to quit Western Europe altogether, given the need to guard against Soviet expansion, but all non-French military personnel would have to leave France and their installations would be shut down as the alliance’s headquarters went from Paris to Brussells. NATO planes would not be allowed to use French air space without prior agreement. While hardly a surprise, de Gaulle’s move aroused considerable emotion on the other side of the Atlantic; Johnson [president Lyndon Baynes] told Dean Rusk [ US secretary of state] to ask de Gaulle if he wanted the American dead of two world wars to be removed as well. According to [Rusk], the question left the General embarrassed.’

 

 

1968

‘ He had been removed from ordinary life for too long, living in a cocoon of power. He spent his days on policy matters, on provincial and foreign visits, at banquets and formal occasions. Spontaneity has no place in his existence, let alone the free lives and loves sought by the new generation. He was interested in the fate of France’s young people as a group, but did not view them as individuals.

His moral code was strict, buttressed by his wife’s extreme conservatism. Peyrefitte recounts that, when he got into the plane taking the presidential couple to Poland in 1967, Madame de Gaulle asked him in what he called ‘a sort of jubilation’: ‘ So, It’s true, you are going to ban miniskirts?’ This was the result of a radio phone-in at which the minister had been asked whether girls wearing short skirts were conducive to boys concentrating on their studies, and had given a noncommittal answer. When he told France’s First Lady that such a measure would not be feasible, he saw a deep disappointment on her face. De Gaulle listened without a word. Peyrefitte thought he sympathised with Tante Yvonne .’

For all his confident words to the French people at the turn of the year, the old soldier was deeply tired and feeling his age, haunted by the memory of Petain declining into senility. The lines on his face were etched ever deeper. HE moved more slowly, his body ponderous, his eye sight feeble. In 1958, he had been intoxicated by the libido of power. During the ensuing years he had constructed a work of political art, but now the exercise of power, the thing he lived most for, was becoming routine and frustrating. The child of France was edging away from its pater-familias, who was thrown back on his familiar complaints that political parties were too powerful, and ministers eunuchs, the country too small for his ambitions, its people sheep. Peace was boring, war impossible, he lamented. ‘Great things always finish badly’ he murmured to Maurice Schumann. To his goddaughter, Martine Lami, he wrote of having before him ‘only shadows while waiting for the night’. ‘There’s nothing difficult left to do, nothing heroic,’ he told Flohic.

 

The end

‘However the final judgement has to be that he was a man who made a huge difference, and put a lasting mark on his country. Though there were social and economic weaknesses, his decade as President of the Fifth Republic saw enormous changes as France adapted and modernised itself. His legacy is attested to by the hollowness of his claim that his departure would be followed by chaos. The institutions he created in 1958 still function. The spirit of his foreign policy endures, even if the edges have been softened.’

‘Pompidou defined Gaullism as a refusal to accept reverses by people with a historical concept of events, who adopt demanding standards and show loyalty. The leader who was dubbed ‘the man who said no’ thus emerges as the opposite – a figure who constructed his own positive response to challenges that generally induced easy, and usually negative, escape routes from the mainstream around him. Gaullism therefore becomes a behaviour system rather than a collection of set beliefs – beyond the basic reverence for the nation state and a hope that all French people can be brought together.’