by Norman Stone
In any case, the collapse of the French position in Indo-China showed what might happen: Dien Bien Phu was rapidly followed by a revolt in Algeria, which started with a characteristic atrocity on All Saints’ Day. On 1 November, La Voix des Arabes from Cairo announced, ‘Today, on the fifth day of the month of Rabii of the year 1374… at one o’clock in the morning, Algeria has begun to live an honourable life… A powerful group of free children of Algeria has started the insurrection of freedom against the tyrannical French imperialism in North Africa.’ What had happened was that, in a remote part of the country, a bus had been ambushed, a protesting village headman machine-gunned, a French schoolteacher shot dead and his wife badly wounded. The ambushers waited around for a while, in order to shoot any rescuers who arrived, but since none did, they left. The French followed this with severe repression, harassed relatively moderate Algerians, dropped bombs, and sent in troops who were only too anxious to avenge the defeat in Vietnam (where the French lost some 90,000 men). Mendès France had been sensible over Vietnam but even he reacted, in the first instance, with an ‘Ici c’est la France.’ But it was not so simple. Now, the ‘National Liberation Front’ was in a much stronger position than had been Algerian rebels in the old days, when Foreign Legionaries could romantically hold desert forts against camel-riding raiders. Several of the rebels had fought in the French army; arms could be supplied across the Tunisian border, or even as it turned out from Yugoslavia, where Tito was in full leader-of-unaligned mode; Nasser was bidding for leadership of the Arab world; and the Americans especially were not in sympathy with French colonization (on a later occasion, the American cultural centre in Algiers was burned down by enraged pieds noirs). Algiers itself was the scene of a foul battle in 1957, when random terrorists provoked retribution, and the French parachutists, under an implacable general, Jacques Émile Massu, restored order. One method was torture. By 1958 the army had in its way won, but the cost was enormous — in fact, a degree of hatred between the two sides (and among the Algerians themselves) that made a solution impossible. The pieds noirs were possessed of a collective rage, and so was much of the army. Meanwhile in Paris the politicians, facing condemnation even from allies, were facing the headache of paying for the unending war, and some of them knew that in an era of decolonization there were other ways of saving France’s position in Algeria. Oil had been discovered in the Sahara and that could be obtained easily enough through collaboration with an independent Algeria. In mid-April one government fell and a moderate, Pierre Pflimlin, took the succession. At the very hint of compromise, Algiers exploded. On 13 May the pieds noirs, who all along felt that metropolitan governments were not nearly harsh enough against the rebels, struck; the governor-general’s palace was stormed and sacked; parts of the army clearly sympathized; even, Massu was asked to set up a ‘Committee of Public Safety’, an emergency institution that went back to the days of the great Revolution when France had been invaded. A few days later, a parachute unit from Algeria seized the island of Corsica. There was strong pressure in Paris for a return of de Gaulle, the supreme national figure, and the Algerian French supposed that he would impose an Algérie française. There were enormous demonstrations in Algiers (in which a great number of Moslems joined: as ever, in such situations, the Algerian revolt was itself a civil war, and even more Moslems were killed by Moslems than by the French, whose own losses — 30,000 — were surprisingly limited for an eight-year war of this savagery).
The crisis in Algeria and the threat of an army putsch against the government itself at least put an end to the preposterous government crisis. De Gaulle had been thinking. The almost universal belief was that the colonial crises were causing the paralysis of the State. De Gaulle came to the belief that this order should be reversed — that the institutions had to be radically changed for some sensible solution to these interminable conflicts to be found, as after all the British had, more or less, managed. Vietnam stood in very stark contrast to Malaya, where the British had had to fight a long and difficult war but had been very careful to cultivate local allies who were essential to the winning of it. The fact was that a great many of the politicians more or less agreed that the institutions were absurd, and asked only to be put out of their misery in a dignified way. There was some screeching alarmism. The president of the Council of Europe, a standard-issue Belgian socialist, set the tone for many such pronouncements in the future and announced that ‘I am struck by the analogy between the Algiers insurrection and the beginnings of Franco in Spain.’ Some French opponents, and the official Communist Party, spread alarms as to a new version of the Second Empire or even of Vichy France. To that, de Gaulle had an easy answer: he was sixty-seven, not an age at which a man aspires to be dictator. In fact he was soon joined by great numbers of politicians from several parties. He agreed, for form’s sake, to address the existing assembly, did so briefly and to the point: there was crisis in everything. A new constitution was needed, with a strong executive. He was given full powers. A referendum in September endorsed what he did, and the ‘yes’ vote included about one third of the Communists’ usual number.
Changing constitutions — as French experience showed — is not always worth the effort. As Benjamin Constant, one of the many wise defeated liberals whom France produced, remarked, ‘on change de situation mais on transporte dans chacune les tourments dont on espérait se délivrer’. But in this case the constitution also represented a France that was becoming very different indeed from the France of the nineteenth century and of the interwar period. There were children; the rural masses were being broken up; industry could develop even with German competition and there were new sources of energy to supplement France’s none-too-many and none-too-rich coal mines. The historic problem, that the Right was divided, was being overcome. With de Gaulle, a conservative element became united enough at last to form a stable government (though the name of the party changed, over and over again, from UNR (Union pour la Nouvelle République) to RPR (Jacques Chirac’s Rassemblement pour la République) and whatever). It had its dissidents, but the power of the presidency was such that the spoils of office which had made governments so unstable before were now transferred in effect to the Élysée Palace and a coterie round presidents. Spoils of office remained, but at least there was governmental continuity.
Given as much, the Algerian problem was solved in so far as its abolition can be described as a solution: the pieds noirs, almost all of them, left in 1962. When he went to Algeria, de Gaulle had given a strong impression that he would fight for Algérie française, and he proclaimed economic measures that would contain some of the disastrous unemployment that came partly from the sheer terror of the war, and partly from the demographic explosion on the Moslem side. But after a year he was outlining a new policy: Algeria for the Algerians. At that, the army started to rebel again and de Gaulle produced another of his masterpieces: a television address — he practised his quite extraordinary style with much care, to be fondly remembered ever after by caricaturists — in which he began, ‘Eh bien, mon cher et vieux pays’, appealing for popular support. The army leaders were isolated in Algiers, much of the army dissociating itself, and they backed down. In control, de Gaulle could now move towards a settlement with the Algerian rebels, with whom there had been secret negotiations in Switzerland. He could always threaten that, if they went too far, the country could be partitioned, the French retaining a coastal strip. In the event, in July 1962, France recognized Algeria, retaining some rights over the Sahara oil. There had been a final outburst from the unrelenting elements in the army, four senior figures carrying out a putsch in 1961 and then going underground, striking out brutally and almost at random. But they had no future: nor perhaps did they want or expect one. In the summer of 1962, under a broiling sun, a million French settlers now left, leaving Algeria to an unhappy future.
9. Europe 1958
General de Gaulle is supposed to have said, when Algeria left, that the moment had come for ‘Europe’. Th
ere, France would be remade. It mattered that French self-confidence had taken a battering in the middle of the 1950s. French post-war aims, of taking over German resources, had been frustrated, and the Monnet Plan had not worked, at least not in the intended sense. There was a constant shortage of dollars for imports, and the franc was devalued again and again. This all became much worse because of the political system. It reflected the concerns of the old France, and the politicians of 1945 were scared enough by the authoritarian ways of the Vichy regime — and the potential authoritarianism of de Gaulle — not to want a strong executive. The parliamentarians kept decisive powers in their own hands, and arranged for a powerless presidency. This was made worse because the party that held the balance of power — the Radicals — had not been solid. Even their constitution said that they were in effect allowed to split, and they reflected local realities that often had little to do with national matters. Snap votes could destroy a government’s majority, if a prime minister were inept, and a government crisis would duly follow. Then the politicians failed to agree, and governments kept changing in a way that might have been harmless if times were easy, but now appeared ridiculous. There was one government after another — when the final crisis of the Fourth Republic began on 15 April 1958 it was the seventeenth or the twenty-second, depending upon how you define ‘crisis’. Five weeks went by before a Félix Gaillard assembled a thin majority to replace a Maurice Bourgès-Maunoury on 5 November 1957, and the crisis that began with Gaillard’s overthrow on 15 April 1958 had still not been resolved when the final act of the Fourth Republic began on 13 May. As the historian René Rémond comments, there was a sort of liturgy involved as each of the participants — president, party leaders, etc. — knew how the ceremonial went, and it developed its own vocabulary: lifting the mortgage, wiping the slate, testing the slopes, sending back the lift, etc. Karl Marx, asked why it was that the non-socialists produced so many divisions, answered, thunderously, ‘It is in the nature of the petty bourgeoisie to be subjective. ’ The Algerian affair brought about change, at last (as, curiously enough, the beginnings of French rule there, in 1830, had coincided with a domestic half-revolution).
The chief beneficiary of Gaullism was generally the bourgeoisie. This expression covered much more than its nearest equivalent, ‘middle class’, could possibly do in English. It had been the dominant class of the earlier Third Republic, had supplanted the aristocracy, and had been more different from it than had the English middle classes. Alain Besançon’s Une génération manages to paint that world in brief sketches: there is a great deal of property, with a very large private house in Paris, grandmothers in grand flats, on the rue du Faubourg-Saint-Honoré and the boulevard de La-Tour-Maubourg, driven in a Hispano-Suiza; and there are two country properties, one with hundreds of acres of grounds, well laid out by devoted gardeners. There is a whole familia of servants; and young Besançon gets to know the endless varieties of pears (Williams, beurres Hardy, beurres Lebrun, the doyennes du Comice, etc.). As he says, though he is not quite clear what ‘bourgeoisie’ means, it is simply not present in any literature other than French. He describes it as a matter of language and dress; it was a matter of family, too, the aristocracy being much more distant with each other. It was also a happy business, with much to do. Richard Cobb remembers the same phenomenon though he encountered it in a different form. He was sent at fifteen in the mid-thirties to a family that looked after him devotedly, and fell in love with France; then, after the war, he fell in with two eccentric brothers bizarrely occupying a house near the Lycée Saint-Louis (‘grimmest of Paris schools’). Bourgeois France went through a bad time: the killing fields of 1914, the interwar Depression (which gave France negative growth rates longer than in any other major country), and then the years of Occupation and Vichy, which led almost to its collapse. Besançon remembered the period of the fifties as ‘sale et pauvre’; the house yards uneven, plaster falling off, the porters’ kitchen foul-smelling, of cabbage and urine; 40-watt bulbs were used in the cafés, hanging from a wire, and their lavatories were of the Turkish type, with thick newspaper on a string; even the coffee was muddy and the wine was vinegary. It had been the end of a period of disaster when the bourgeois certainties had gone by the board. But with de Gaulle these returned in a peculiar way: there was a distinct bourgeois revival, partly based on glossy state institutions, and partly on the newly successful world-class economic activities. The new Citroën DS, majestically inflating as it was started up, was as much a symbol of sixties Paris as had been the canvas-and-tin deux chevaux of the fifties.
Now that de Gaulle had united the historically divided Right enough to establish a durable government, quite soon France was going to overtake England, for the first time since the French Revolution itself. Charles de Gaulle was truly the man of the decade. As he said in his memoirs, in one of the great first lines of literature, all his life he had had a certain idea of France, and now, in his late sixties, he would restore her greatness. He had gone through the First World War, had been wounded and taken prisoner, had lived through the humiliations of the thirties, when Paris became, in George Orwell’s words, half brothel, half museum. Then had come defeat in 1940, and the German occupation. De Gaulle, going to London with a few companions, had kept the idea of France going, and had become in 1944 the man of the hour. He had repeated the feat in 1958, and, by 1962, a great man known around the globe, he would give France the self-confidence and influence which in his opinion his country deserved. This was very far from being fanciful. France was one of very few European countries from which people did not emigrate: quite the contrary, many foreigners wanted to move there, whether Italians and Spaniards in search of employment, or Englishmen anxious to escape from the taxes and the weather and the babyish restrictions back home. Literature, film, wine, history — everything spoke for France. There had been one long-term problem, again a uniquely French experience, in that her people since the great Revolution had made fewer and fewer babies. In the seventeenth century there had been more Frenchmen than Russians, but by 1914 there were almost five times as many Russians (or subjects of the Tsar). Why, is a good question: the answer is probably to be found in the French Revolution, which gave land to the peasant, and the Code Napoléon which forcibly divided inheritances among children. There was enough to keep one child, and the size of the farm meant that only one extra pair of hands was needed, while only one extra mouth could be fed. In the slump of the thirties, as everywhere else, parents stopped producing babies, and the French population hardly went up, except through immigration, after 1870. The war, and the Occupation, changed this, for mysterious reasons: in 1949 there were almost a million births, one third more than in 1939, which was itself one of the better years for births, and by 1960 the young in France once more outnumbered the old. Families now produced three children, not one. De Gaulle, though himself elderly, spoke for a new generation, and French self-confidence began to recover.
De Gaulle’s prestige ran very high because, since 1958, France had flourished, and this was shown in the very considerable power of his new presidential office. In the summer, there had been consultation over a new constitution, which was supposed to do away with the political swings-and-roundabouts of the Third and Fourth Republics. Then, because the politicians did not want an authoritarian figure as head of state, the presidency was a mainly ceremonial office. Now, the president had much greater power (the historian Jean Lacouture remarked that the executive had such power that ‘this republic’ tends to be ‘on the frontiers of the democratic world’). The prime minister in the Matignon Palace also had power, though less of it, and there was a potential for conflict, but in 1958 this did not matter. De Gaulle had the constitution approved by an enormous majority with a referendum. On 21 December 1958 he got nearly 80 per cent of the vote, as president. On the whole he chose resistance men for his team, and Georges Pompidou, though now at the Rothschild Bank, was marked with great favour as he did as he was told.
Onc
e in office, de Gaulle ran affairs in grand style (he once terminated an interview when the woman journalist crossed her legs), though often with a human touch, like a good commander-in-chief keeping up with his men. He also disciplined his time: curiously enough he used to read Le Monde cover to cover, though he did not regard it as ‘national’ and generally disliked the press. He loved the James Bond films and television in the evening but also kept up with his reading, always punctiliously thanking in his own hand authors who sent their books. Someone said of him that in moments of idleness he was like a Henry Moore statue. Twice a year was the press conference, when de Gaulle would speak for up to one and a half hours, very well-rehearsed beforehand, and exhausting, like a theatrical performance or, as his press secretary said, like a woman giving birth. On television he had ‘the eyes of an elephant’ and a face like Rodin’s Balzac. His courage was not in dispute, and at Kennedy’s funeral he behaved characteristically — waving aside the insistent offer of an armour-plated limousine so that he could walk at the side of Kennedy’s widow and son, when other statesmen behaved with self-preserving prudence. At any rate, an indisputable charisma.
He himself was such a figure as to conceal the possible problems — that power would be transferred from a fractious and difficult assembly to a presidential court, far less visible from the outside, and therefore likely to be very corrupt; and there was a further problem that, without formal opposition, informal opposition in the streets would grow — as was to happen, within a few years. But de Gaulle himself was utterly incorruptible (in the fifties his wife had discreetly made ends meet by selling heirloom silver as she otherwise had to make do on a colonel’s pension). A. J. P. Taylor rightly noted that only one man in French politics had emerged from office significantly poorer, de Gaulle, and one man in English politics significantly richer, Lloyd George (since then, Blair has joined the little list). Even then there were complaints that the State dominated the media, especially television, and at one ceremony foreign journalists — hated figures, given the Algerian problem — were kicked and manhandled. In the event, even Communists voted ‘yes’: the total ‘no’ vote being a million short of their own 5,500,000 in the elections. There followed the lengthy effort at peace in Algeria together with self-assertion in matters European, and this marked the whole presidency.