by Tony Judt
In February 1958 the newly installed government of Felix Gaillard was embarrassed by the French air force’s bombing of Sakhiet, a town across the border in Tunisia suspected of serving as a base for Algerian nationalists. The resulting international outcry, and offers of Anglo-American ‘good offices’ to help solve the Algerian imbroglio, led to growing fears among the Europeans of Algeria that Paris was planning to abandon them. Policemen and soldiers in Paris and Algiers began openly to demonstrate their sympathy for the settlers’ cause. The Gaillard government, France’s third in eleven months, resigned on April 15th. Ten days later there was a huge demonstration in Algiers demanding the preservation in perpetuity of French Algeria and the return to power of De Gaulle; the organizers of the gathering formed themselves into a Committee of Public Safety, provocatively echoing the French Revolutionary institution of the same name.
On May 15th, forty-eight hours after yet another French government, led by Pierre Pfimlin, had been inaugurated in Paris, General Raoul Salan—the French military commander in Algeria—shouted out De Gaulle’s name to a cheering crowd in the Forum in Algiers. De Gaulle himself, who had been conspicuously silent since retreating from public life to his home village of Colombey in eastern France, reappeared in public to address a press conference on May 19th. Armed rebels seized control of the island of Corsica and Paris was gripped by rumours of imminent paratroop landings. On May 28th Pfimlin resigned and President René Coty called upon De Gaulle to form a government. Without even pretending to demur, De Gaulle took office on June 1st and was voted full powers by the National Assembly the following day. His first act was to fly to Algiers, where on June 4th he announced delphically to an enthusiastic crowd of cheering soldiers and grateful Europeans: ‘Je vous ai compris’ (‘I have understood you’).
The new French Prime Minister had indeed understood his Algerian supporters, better than they knew. He was immensely popular among the Europeans of Algeria, who saw him as their saviour: in the referendum of September 1958 De Gaulle secured 80 percent of the vote in France, but 96 percent of the vote in Algeria.104 But among De Gaulle’s many distinctive traits was an unwavering appreciation for order and legitimacy. The hero of the Free French, the implacable critic of Vichy, the man who had restored the credibility of the French state after August 1944 was no friend of the Algerian rebels (many of them former Pétainists), much less the free-thinking insurrectionary young officers who had taken their part. His first task, as he understood it, was to restore the authority of government in France. His second and related objective was to resolve the Algerian conflict that had so dramatically undermined it.
Within a year it was clear that Paris and Algiers were on a collision course. International opinion was increasingly favorable to the FLN and its demand for independence. The British were granting independence to their African colonies. Even the Belgians finally released the Congo in June 1960 (albeit in an irresponsible manner and with disastrous results).105 Colonial Algeria was fast becoming an anachronism, as De Gaulle fully understood. He had already established a ‘Communauté Française’ as the first step towards a ‘commonwealth’ of France’s former colonies. South of the Sahara, formal independence would be granted rapidly to French-educated elites of countries that were far too weak to stand alone and would thus be utterly dependent on France for decades to come. In September 1959, just one year after coming to power, the French President proposed ‘self-determination’ for Algeria.
Infuriated by what they regarded as evidence of a coming sell-out, officers and settlers in Algeria began planning a full-scale revolt. There were plots, coups and talk of revolution. In January 1960 barricades went up in Algiers and ‘ultra-patriots’ shot at French gendarmes. But the revolt collapsed in the face of De Gaulle’s intransigence and unreliable senior officers (including Massu and his superior, General Maurice Challe) were carefully re-assigned away from Algeria. The disturbances continued, however, culminating in an unsuccessful military putsch in April 1961, inspired by the newly formed OAS (Organisation de l’Armée Secrète). But the conspirators failed to shift De Gaulle, who went on French national radio to denounce the ‘military pronunciamento by a handful of retired generals’. The chief victim of the coup was the morale and the international image (what remained of it) of the French Army. An overwhelming majority of Frenchmen and women, many of them with sons serving in Algeria, drew the conclusion that Algerian independence was not just inevitable but desirable—and for the sake of France, the sooner the better.106
De Gaulle, ever the realist, began negotiations with the FLN at the spa town of Evian on Lake Geneva. Initial talks, conducted in June 1960 and again during June and July 1961, had failed to find common ground. A renewed attempt, in March 1962, was more successful, after just ten days of discussion the two sides reached agreement and on March 19th, after nearly eight years of unbroken fighting, the FLN declared a cease-fire. On the basis of the terms agreed at Evian De Gaulle called a referendum on Sunday July 1st and the French people voted overwhelmingly to free themselves of the Algerian shackle. Two days later Algeria became an independent state.
The Algerian tragedy did not end there. The OAS grew into a fully fledged underground organization, committed first to preserving French Algeria and then, after that failed, to punishing those who had ‘betrayed’ their cause. In February 1962 alone, OAS operatives and bombs killed 553 people. Spectacular assassination attempts on French Culture Minister André Malraux and on De Gaulle himself were unsuccessful, though at least one plan to ambush the President’s car as he drove through the Parisian suburb of Petit Clamart came perilously close to succeeding. For a few years in the early sixties France was in the grip of a determined and increasingly desperate terrorist threat. The French intelligence services ultimately broke the OAS, but the memory lingered.
Meanwhile, millions of Algerians were forced into French exile against their will. The European pieds-noirs settled for the most part in southern France; the first generation harbored longstanding grievances against the French authorities for betraying their cause and forcing them off their property and out of their jobs. Algeria’s Jews also abandoned the country, some for Israel, many—like the Moroccan Jews before them—for France, where they would come in time to constitute the largest (and predominantly Sephardic) Jewish community in Western Europe. Many Arabs, too, quit independent Algeria. Some left in anticipation of the repressive, dogmatic rule of the FLN. Others, notably those who had worked with the French or served as auxiliaries with French police and military authorities—the so-called harkis—fled the predictable wrath of the victorious nationalists. Many were caught and suffered horrible retribution; but even those who made it safely to France got no thanks from the French and scant acknowledgement or recompense for their sacrifices.
France was in a hurry to forget its Algerian trauma. The Evian Agreements of 1962 put an end to nearly five decades of war or fear of war in French life. The population was weary—weary of crises, weary of fighting, weary of threats and rumours and plots. The Fourth Republic had lasted just twelve years. Unloved and unlamented, it was cruelly weakened from the outset by the absence of an effective executive—a legacy of the Vichy experience, which had made post-war legislators reluctant to establish a strong presidency. It was handicapped by its parliamentary and electoral systems, which favored multiple parties and produced unstable coalition governments. It oversaw unprecedented social changes but these generated a divisive political backlash. Pierre Poujade, a bookseller from St Céré in the deep south-west of France, formed Europe’s first single-issue protest party to defend ‘des petits, des matraqués, des spoliés, des laminés, des humiliés’: the ripped-off, lied-to, humiliated little men and women left behind by history. Fifty-two anti-system, ‘poujadist’ deputies won parliamentary seats in the national elections of 1956.
But above all, the first post-war French republic was brought low by its colonial struggles. Like the Ancien Régime, the Fourth Republic was crippled by the costs
of war. Between December 1955 and December 1957 France lost two-thirds of its currency reserves, despite the steady growth of the economy. Exchange controls, multiple exchange rates (comparable to those operated by the Soviet bloc in later decades), foreign debt, budget deficits and chronic inflation were all attributable to the uncontrolled expenses of unsuccessful colonial wars, from 1947 to 1954 and again from 1955 onwards. Governments of every hue divided and fell when faced with these hurdles. Even without a disaffected army, the Fourth Republic would have been hard pressed to face down such challenges just a decade after the worst military defeat in the nation’s history and a humiliating four-year occupation. The wonder is that it lasted as long as it did.
The institutions of Charles de Gaulle’s Fifth French Republic were designed to avoid precisely the defects of its predecessor. The Assembly and the political parties were reduced in significance, the executive was dramatically strengthened: the constitution gave the President considerable control and initiative in the making of policy, and absolute sway over prime ministers whom he could appoint and dismiss virtually at will. In the aftermath of his success in ending the Algerian conflict, De Gaulle proposed that the President of the Republic be henceforth elected by direct universal suffrage (rather than indirectly, by the Assembly, as hitherto); this amendment to the constitution was duly approved in a referendum of October 28th 1962. Sustained by his institutions, his record and his personality—and French memories of the alternative—the French President now had more power than any other freely elected head of state or government in the world.
In domestic affairs, De Gaulle was for the most part content to leave daily business to his prime ministers. The radical economic reform program that began with the issuing of a new franc on December 27th 1958 was in line with earlier recommendations from the International Monetary Fund, and it contributed directly to the stabilization of France’s troubled finances. For all his mandarin allure De Gaulle was a natural radical, unafraid of change: as he had written in Vers l’armée de métier (‘The Army of the Future’), a youthful treatise on military reform: ‘Nothing lasts unless it is incessantly renewed.’ It is thus not surprising that many of the most significant transformations in French transportation infrastructure, town planning and state-directed industrial investment were conceived and begun under his authority.
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 Gaulle had particular cause to feel ambivalent towards Washington, where Franklin Roosevelt never took him seriously. The United States maintained good relations with the wartime Vichy regime far longer than was decent or prudent. France was absent from the wartime Allied negotiations; and even though this allowed De Gaulle in later years cynically to disclaim responsibility for a Yalta agreement of which he privately approved, the memory rankled. But the worst humiliations came after the war was won. France was effectively shut out of all major decisions over Germany. Intelligence-sharing between Britain and the US was never extended to France (which was rightly assumed to be dangerously leaky). The nuclear ‘club’ did not include France, reduced thereby to unprecedented irrelevance in international military calculations.
Worse still, France had been utterly dependent on the USA in its colonial war in Asia. In October 1956, when Britain, France and Israel conspired to attack Nasser’s Egypt, it was President Eisenhower who pressured the British into withdrawing, to France’s impotent fury. A year later, in November 1957, French diplomats fumed helplessly when British and American arms were delivered to Tunisia, despite French fears that these would end up in Algerian rebel hands. Shortly after taking office in 1958, De Gaulle himself was bluntly informed by General Norstad, the American commander of NATO, that he was not entitled to learn details of the American deployment of nuclear weapons on French soil.
This is the background to De Gaulle’s foreign policy once he assumed full presidential powers. Of the Americans he expected little. From nuclear weapons to the dollar’s privileged international status as a reserve currency, the US was in a position to impose its interests on the rest of the Western alliance and could be expected to do so. The US could not be trusted, but it was at least predictable; the important thing was not to be dependent on Washington, as French policy had been in Indo-China and again at Suez. France must stand its ground as best it could—for example, by acquiring its own nuclear weapon. De Gaulle’s attitude to Britain, however, was more complicated.
Like most observers, the French President reasonably and correctly assumed that Great Britain would strive to maintain its position halfway between Europe and America—and that, if forced to chose, London would opt for its Atlantic ally over its European neighbors. This was brought home very forcibly in December 1962, when the British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan met President Kennedy at Nassau, in the Bahamas, and accepted an arrangement whereby the US would furnish Britain with Polaris submarine-based nuclear missiles (as part of a multilateral force that effectively subsumed Britain’s nuclear arms under US control).
De Gaulle was furious. Before traveling to Nassau, Macmillan had held talks with De Gaulle at Rambouillet; but he had given the French President no indication of what was to come. Nassau, then, was yet another ‘Anglo-American’ arrangement cooked up behind France’s back. To this injury was added further insult when Paris was itself offered the same Polaris missiles, on similar conditions, without even having been party to the discussions. It was against this background that President De Gaulle announced, at his press conference on January 14th 1963 that France was vetoing Britain’s application to join the European Economic Community. If Britain wished to be a US satellite, so be it. But it could not be ‘European’ as well. Meanwhile—as we have seen—De Gaulle turned towards Bonn and signed the highly symbolic if utterly insubstantial Treaty with the Federal Republic.
The idea that France could compensate for its vulnerability to Anglo-American pressure by aligning with its old enemy across the Rhine was hardly new. Back in June 1926 the French diplomat Jacques Seydoux had minuted in a confidential note to his political bosses that ‘it is better to work with the Germans to dominate Europe than to find ourselves against them . . . a Franco-German rapprochement will allow us to get out all the quicker from the Anglo-American grip’.107 Similar thinking had lain behind the calculations of conservative diplomats who backed Pétain in 1940. But in the circumstances of 1963 the Treaty with Germany made little practical difference. The French had no plans to leave the Western alliance, and De Gaulle had not the least intention of being dragged into any German schemes to revise the post-war settlement in the East.
What the Treaty of 1963 and the new Franco-German condominium really co
nfirmed was France’s decisive turn towards Europe. For Charles de Gaulle, the lesson of the twentieth century was that France could only hope to recover its lost glories by investing in the European project and shaping it into the service of French goals. Algeria was gone. The colonies were going. The Anglo-Americans were as unsympathetic as ever. The serial defeats and losses of the past decades left France with no other option, if it hoped to recover some of its past influence: as Adenauer had reassured French Prime Minister Guy Mollet on the day that the French were forced by US pressure and British compliance to halt their operations at Suez, ‘Europe will be your revenge.’
With one important exception, the British retreat from empire was very different from that of the French. Britain’s colonial inheritance was larger and more complicated.The British Empire, like the Soviet one, survived the war intact, if battered. Great Britain depended heavily on imperial growers for basic foodstuffs (unlike France, which was self-sufficient in foodstuffs and whose overwhelmingly tropical imperial territories produced very different commodities); and in certain theatres of the war—North Africa in particular—Commonwealth troops had outnumbered British soldiers. The residents of Britain itself were, as we have seen, far more conscious of Empire than their French counterparts—one reason why London was so much bigger than Paris was that it had thrived on its imperial role as port, commercial entrepôt, manufacturing center and financial capital. The BBC guidelines in 1948 advised broadcasters to be mindful of their predominantly non-Christian overseas audience: ‘Disrespectful, let alone derogatory, references to Buddhists, Hindus, Moslems and so on . . . may cause deep offense and are to be avoided altogether.’