Portraits and Miniatures (15 page)

Churchill frequently contemplated withdrawing support from de Gaulle and trying to eliminate him as leader of the Fighting French (as they had become in 1942) and on one occasion delivered himself of the immortal phrase: ‘
Si vous m'obstaclerez, je vous liquiderai.'
But he knew that he could not do so for three reasons of mounting order of importance. First, he had Eden as a sometimes exasperated but courageous and persistent ally of de Gaulle sitting on his doorstep. He set higher store by Roosevelt, but Eden was more present. Second, he did not in the last resort wish to ditch de Gaulle. He was sentimental and the General was for him part of the magic myth of 1940. Third, de Gaulle's strength in France (and his popularity in Britain) grew almost inexorably with every wartime year that went by. The unknown and presumptuous brigadier of 1940 became the national leader of 1942, 1943 and 1944. In the second half of the war he could not have been jettisoned without the most appalling consequences on the French internal resistance movement.

De Gaulle was not allowed much of a role in the Normandy invasion. On 4 June, two days before D-day, he was summoned to Britain after an absence of a full year in North Africa and given
a briefing by Churchill. The military part of the discussion went well, the political part much less so. De Gaulle wrote in his memoirs that Churchill had said: ‘How can you expect us to differ from the United States? We are able to liberate Europe only because the Americans are with us. Any time we have to choose between Europe and the open seas
(le grand large),
we shall always be for the open seas. Every time I have to choose between you and Roosevelt, I shall choose Roosevelt.' These do not strike me as
ipsissima verba,
but no doubt they approximate to the reality, and in any event were what de Gaulle believed Churchill had said, which was what counted for the future.

After some hesitation de Gaulle was allowed to pay a forty-eight-hour visit to the bridgehead starting on the eighth day of the invasion. His visit was regarded as an irritating distraction by both the Americans and the British, but not by the French population. In Bayeux he was received with an emotion and an automatic acceptance of his authority that was wholly spontaneous because he was not expected and people at first had difficulty realizing that it was he. This first
bain de Joule
on metropolitan French soil was a major fortification of his self-confidence. It did not make him more amenable but it made him calmer. He accepted a further two months away from France, mostly with his provisional government in North Africa, but interspersed with visits first to the Pope in Rome and then to Roosevelt in Washington. The latter did not go as badly as it might have done.

He returned to France (from North Africa) only after the allied troops had broken out of the Normandy peninsula and the liberation of Paris seemed imminent. He came in an American plane which broke down on the way, and he was full of suspicion. But he reached Eisenhower's headquarters on 20 August and mostly got his way with him. Leclerc's French division was allowed to lead a direct assault on Paris and de Gaulle himself entered the city on 25 August. His objectives then were a mixture of the warm and the cold. He wanted to savour, in joyous unity with some of those who had helped him achieve it, one of the most remarkable turns of fortune in a span of fifty months ever brought about by any individual. He also wanted to make clear
to the leaders of the Resistance, many of whom were Communists, who was boss.

In the glow of the first he never lost sight of the second objective. Thus, after a rendezvous with Leclerc and a Resistance representative at the Gare Montparnasse, he went first, not to the Hôtel de Ville where the other Resistance leaders were awaiting him, but to the Ministry of War in the rue St Dominique where he installed himself in the office (curiously quite unchanged) out of which he had been prised by the government's evacuation of Paris on 10 June 1940. Then, having established both continuity and a grip on the levers of authority, he did go to the Hôtel de Ville, but via police headquarters (thus putting his hand on another lever), and when he got there announced his triumphant parade down the Champs Elysées for the following afternoon. He thought that ‘perhaps two million people' attended.
‘Ah! C'est la mer,
' he recorded himself as saying, ‘And I, in the midst of it all, feel not a person but an instrument of destiny.' From the Concorde he went to Notre Dame for a
Te Deum.
Thus did he seek a reunion of state and Church which had been rare since 1870, and only intermittent since 1789.

Three days later he organized a more surprising parade over the same mile and a half of grand avenue. He and General Omar Bradley reviewed an American march past. Eisenhower said it was at de Gaulle's request. He wanted to show the Resistance that if there was any trouble he had the big battalions on his side. If the explanation was correct it was a striking illustration of his ability not only to use pride when he wished but also to subordinate it when that too served his purpose.

Ten weeks later on 11 November there was a third Champs Elysées parade. At a time of severe adversity Churchill had said to de Gaulle: ‘One day we'll go down the Champs Elysées together.' He was determined to do so, and de Gaulle recognized that he had to discharge the obligation. But in the pictures they do not match. Churchill looked determinedly happy. De Gaulle looked sour. He did not like sharing occasions. It was the less attractive side of his character. By then, however, he was engaged not in looking forward to governing a liberated although
impoverished and divided France but in the more intractable task of actually doing it, and, this first time round, was proving by no means adept.

The last months of 1944 were not, however, too bad. He was mostly as well received in the provinces as in Paris. He made his writ run throughout the country, and successfully surmounted the biggest obstacle to the authority of the state by insisting on the incorporation of the Resistance militias into the regular army. He established a coalition government, including two Communists, but presided over it with an icy discipline rather than a democratic camaraderie. In 1945 he was excluded from the Yalta and Potsdam conferences but given, thanks to Churchill's pressure on Roosevelt, an occupation zone in Germany and a permanent seat on the UN Security Council. In spite of these concessions he continued to provoke his more powerful allies. He refused an invitation to meet Roosevelt in Algiers on the President's last journey back to the United States. And two months after Roosevelt's death Churchill was telling Truman that de Gaulle was ‘the worst enemy of France in her troubles' and ‘one of the greatest dangers to European peace'.

Nineteen forty-five also brought victory, but that for de Gaulle was no more than a postscript to the Liberation. In addition it brought the re-emergence of party politics in France. De Gaulle wished to be above them and in July took the decision not to field candidates for the October elections to a new Assembly that was not only to control the government but to frame a new constitution for a new Republic. This Constituent Assembly, in which the Communists were the largest party but were closely followed by the new MRP (which was loosely but not loyally Gaullist) and they by the Socialists, proceeded in November unanimously to elect de Gaulle President of the Government, but then to spend the remaining six weeks of the year in ensuring that he had as little power as possible. The Fourth Republic, just as much as the Third, was to be dominated by the shifting alliances of a legislative chamber which neither the head of state nor the head of government had power to dissolve. This was wholly contrary to de Gaulle's ideas, and his mind began to
move towards resignation, a destination at which it arrived on 20 January 1946.

His resignation statement was brief, in a way brutal for it set out the alternative with an almost unnecessary starkness, yet it was essentially unchallenging, for it deliberately turned away from ‘a general on a white horse' scenario. ‘The exclusive regime of the political parties has returned. I condemn it. But, unless I use force to set up a dictatorship, which I do not desire, and which would doubtless come to a bad end, I have no means of preventing this experiment. So I must retire.'

He did not want a coup. But he certainly expected more dismay at his departure than was manifested. The politicians, even the MRP, did not mind. Nor, it appeared, did the public. And France's allies were rather relieved. Colombey-les-Deux-Eglises was not rehabilitated until five months later, and de Gaulle at first merely went to Marly in the royal forests of the Ile-de-France. His proximity to Paris led to no press of crowds to draw him back. In June he began his nearly twelve years of retreat in the Haute Marne. They were, however, divided sharply into two parts. Until 1953 he endeavoured to come back to power through the RPF (Rally of the French People), the programme for which he had outlined at Bayeux nine months earlier and the launch of which he proclaimed at Strasbourg in April 1947. His choice of locations was fully exploitative of his reputation: the Norman town where he had first re-mingled with the French people at the beginning of the Liberation and the Alsatian city that he had saved from reoccupation by the Germans in rough encounters with Eisenhower and Churchill as a consequence of the last Ardennes flourish of the Third Reich at the end of 1944.

He became neither the first nor the last man to use the back-cloth of national glories for partisan political purposes. What was more surprising was that he did so with only modified success. His rallies were commanding, perhaps a little too much so for democratic taste, but his supporters were not entirely satisfactory, too few of his left-of-centre adherents of London days and too many of those who had been content to go along with Vichy, and a feeling that more than at any other stage of his career he
was being driven towards the shores of reaction. The electoral performance followed a pattern sometimes experienced by new political movements. Seven months after its launch the RPF polled 40 per cent in municipal elections. But municipal elections do not determine political destiny. When the next national elections came the RPF was down to 21.5 per cent of the vote. This gave them 120 seats in the Assembly. But what were they to do with them? Eventually half their deputies decided they wanted to play the game of parliamentary power broking and drifted out of the General's control and into successive Fourth Republican governments.

That was effectively the end of the RPF, which had throughout been one of the less glorious chapters of de Gaulle's career. For the remaining five years before his return to power he was in almost full retreat at Colombey. He worked at his memoirs, and the first two volumes appeared to great acclaim in October 1956 and June 1958. He tried one more political manifestation. In May 1954 on the feast of Joan of Arc he announced that he would appear at the Étoile and lay a wreath on the tomb of the Unknown Soldier, and implicitly invited a mass silent demonstration. It was not a success. As he got into his car after the ceremony he murmured ‘Le
peuple n'est pas tellement là.'
He gave only one press conference in four years, his very occasional speeches were commemorative rather than political, and his solitude was broken only by occasional visits from faithful adherents, Courcel, Guichard, Debré, Malraux, or, still less frequently, from one of two more independent politicians - Mendés-France, for example, for whom he had a certain regard.

The flame of his hope of a return must have flickered very low as the years advanced - he was sixty-seven in the autumn of 1957 - and his body was manifestly ageing. This sense of time running out may have pushed him to sail as close as he did to the shores of illegality, and even of disrepute, on the route by which he came back to power. He did not mount a military coup and therefore did not directly contradict his abnegatory dictum of January 1946. But he allowed the explicit threat of a military rebellion in Algiers, and the implicit threat that it would spread
to Paris, to destroy the Pflimlin Government, the last of the Fourth Republic, and to cause both Pflimlin and President Coty to seek a legal transfer of power to de Gaulle. Until this was secure de Gaulle declined to curb the rebellious generals. On the contrary he heightened the tension by referring to ‘the collapse of the state' and announcing his own readiness to assume once more, as in June 1940, ‘the powers of the Republic'. If this did not happen, he would leave the regime to die in the ditch of its own weakness.

Coty was convinced that de Gaulle was the only alternative to civil war and determined to commission him as Prime Minister. There were still difficulties with the political groups. The Socialists were the key. De Gaulle received the two most prominent, Mollet, the Premier of the Suez adventure, and Vincent Auriol, President of the Republic from 1947 to 1954, at Colombey and persuaded them of his attachment to Republican democracy. Nevertheless, they were able to carry the Socialist parliamentary group by only seventy-seven votes to seventy-four. The majority of the minority then accepted group discipline and with it de Gaulle was endorsed in an Assembly vote by 329 to 224 with thirty-two abstentions. The margin was not vast, particularly in view of the Socialist ‘block vote'. The meat the Assembly had been required to swallow was, however, very strong. The next day it had to vote special powers for the new head of government to restore order in Algeria and in France and to draw up a new constitution, and then put itself into recess, at one of the most critical moments in the history of post-war France, for four and a half months. Once elected, de Gaulle's democratic behaviour was almost as impeccable as he had managed to convince Mollet and Auriol that it would be, but the methods by which he came to power remain less admirable. It is rare for so much that is respectable and desirable to come out of such an ambiguous beginning.

De Gaulle was Prime Minister for seven months, and then, with a new constitution approved in a referendum by a 79 per cent positive vote, President for ten years and four months. During this too-long reign his popular support varied enough for
him to contemplate resignation on at least two occasions, but until 1969 it was never insufficient for survival. Although the Fifth Republic was based on a great tilt of power from the legislature to the executive there was not at first a directly elected presidency. De Gaulle was elected in December 1958 by 78 per cent of the votes in college of a few thousand notables. A month before that the new Gaullist organization had won two-fifths of the seats in the Assembly and had no difficulty in finding enough parliamentary allies to provide a majority. Then in 1962 de Gaulle decided to strengthen the presidency by moving to direct election. This was opposed by a majority of the Assembly which carried a vote of censure. De Gaulle ordered both a referendum and a dissolution of the Assembly. The former produced a ‘yes' vote of 62 per cent, which, however, he regarded as disappointing, being not quite a half of the total electorate. The parliamentary elections none the less gave for the first time a small absolute Gaullist majority of seats.