Letter from Paris: Le Grand Charlie a Bit Less Grand
Bloch-Michel, Jean
"He made a mistake" —this confused admission of his followers may herald the end of the de Gaulle myth. The French role in the Middle East crisis last summer not only shocked de Gaulle's...
...Gaullism is crumbling not because of Israel but because it has failed to destroy or transform a natural French political tradition—the tradition of diversity—which is now finally coming back into its own...
...Since Gaullism is losing its coherence, its name will no longer ensure an electoral victory...
...But the Right has never forgotten that de Gaulle's postwar government, a Communist-SocialistCatholic coalition, was responsble for the nationalizations of industry...
...Giscard has disobeyed all orders from de Gaulle to restore the institutional link between his group and the majority of Gaullists...
...He doesn't know—or doesn't want to know—that Russia and the United States have reached an unshakeable agreement on one point: they will not go to war with each other...
...I would put it this way: de Gaulle has not understood the lesson of Cuba and Vietnam...
...But the world of today is not the Europe of yesterday...
...but they like instability and political crises even less...
...He represented authority, the fight against the parties, contempt for politics—even if his policies, in Algeria and in France, often went against its grain...
...I told them not to attack," he said...
...The General's antiAmericanism, drove him into the other camp...
...The crisis of Gaullism caused by the General's foreign policy is not likely to prove fatal...
...Their attitude is "Yes...
...It may give occasional explanations to Parliament, and also demands periodically a massive approval, granted without previous discussion, by the people—or the Nation, as the General puts it...
...Its great hero is Antoine Pinay, a provincial notable who is the epitome of moderation: he has passed from moderate Petainism to moderate Gaullism...
...The final and most likely explanation is this: any help given to Israel would have meant alignment with the United States...
...Politics, in the monarchical conception of Gaullism, is the preserve of the government...
...The French Left has also been affected...
...But more, French pro-Israeli sentiment has not always been pure...
...The election of 1959 was, in this respect, significant: the great majority of the Gaullist deputies had no political past and were elected on the strength of their political innocence...
...It's a very different story with the true French Right, which has been the backbone of Gaullism, though often ill at ease with it...
...He made a mistake" —this confused admission of his followers may herald the end of the de Gaulle myth...
...Giscard d'Estaing is trying to appeal to the moderates, the center of the electorate...
...But his Independent Republicans continue to exist...
...After all, nobody reproaches Guy Mollet for his Suez venture where he was clearly in the wrong, while Pierre Mendes-France had to wait ten years before the French forgave him for being right in Indochina...
...France is returning gently to the political patterns of the Third and Fourth Republics...
...The centrifugal movement was started not so much by the pranks of the so-called Gaullist Left as by the Right Gaullist Giscard d'Estaing, when he asserted his freedom...
...The Left became united in l%7, because the Right had a coherent and monolithic majority which a divided Left could not confront in an election...
...Then there is the theory of the "cold monsters": a state cannot afford to have sentiments and France, like England before her, must have only interests, not friends...
...But they have an eye on the succession...
...Also—though de Gaulle will never admit it—the weight of France in today's balance of power is slight...
...for Left and Right in France are parallel in both unity and disunity...
...These explanations offer some insight, but none is sufficient to explain de Gaulle's monumental error...
...has always appealed to a considerable number of French voters who see the deputies as clowns or profiteers...
...Since the Gaullist UNR remained disciplined in two parliaments, the Left had to match this discipline...
...He believed that the Middle East confrontation could, or even would, draw them into a world war...
...For it had been the French Right that, by its very nature, had gathered most strongly around de Gaulle...
...Kick the rascals out...
...Gaullism started as an almost instinctive reaction of the French electorate to a situation— the Algerian War—with which it felt unable to cope...
...Even as de Gaulle tries to present to the country an image of an unchanged parliamentary majority, Giscard is ruining that image...
...But whenever the Left does not face t united and disciplined opponent, its tnity tends to disintegrate...
...Giscard d'Estaing hopes to win them over after the General is gone...
...The French role in the Middle East crisis last summer not only shocked de Gaulle's followers...
...They disobeyed— and so were expelled from the Gaullist paradise...
...Poujade's cry, faites sortir les sortants...
...It means the wish for a political life inspired by the desires of the voters, and nothing displeases Gaullism more than such a reliance on the popular will...
...The government's foreign policy was now for the first time openly opposed by a large majority...
...Mistakes in foreign policy are politically less calamitous than bad luck at home—or even than doing the right thing abroad...
...Still, the Right dislikes the sumptuous austerity of the regime and its belief in an active economic role for the state...
...For many, Israel's victory over the Arabs was a revenge for our defeat in Algeria...
...Gaullism has, indeed, satisfied the secondary ideas of the Right: nationalism, authority, prestige, independence, xenophobia...
...It was so large that even the French Communist party rapidly moderated the anti-Israeli attitude it had adopted...
...And if these did little more for eight years than say "yes" to anything the government asked of them, that also appealed to voters who want "serious" politics, not interminable debates on subjects they know little about...
...De Gaulle's attitude shocked and troubled many sincere Gaullists...
...But now, there has been a return to the old parliamentary patterns, to the multiplication of groups and "nuances" within them, and all this has penetrated the very Gaullist majority that was supposed to prevent it...
...He knows they like neither Gaullism nor de Gaulle...
...For to be of the "Left" is to give politics a significance that Gaullism refuses to see...
...A few million Israelis count for less than the hundreds of millions of Arabs, with their oil and with French economic and cultural investments in their lands...
...As soon as the Independent Republicans began to feel they were Giscardians rather than Gaullists, the former Radicals and Popular Republicans began to feel the attraction of their old labels, which still mean something—and this is by no means certain about Gaullism without the General...
...Later, Gaullism fulfilled its desire for stability and catered to the rudimentary antiparliamentarism that has always existed on the French Right...
...There is also the explanation given by the General himself at an Elysee reception, which seems to come from a comedy by Moliere...
...Some blame de Gaulle's counselors for giving him wrong advice...
...As long as de Gaulle is there, Giscard and his men will remain within the majority...
...Gaullism of the Left" is a matter of a few individuals, without a following...
...Finally, a considerable part of French public opinion—the whole Right, all the moderates and a part of the Left—took a very dim view of France's alignment with the Soviet position...
...it made them aware there was something wrong with his thinking...
...Occasionally they agitate ; but a paternal command is enough to stop them...
...The General has always looked down on the Gaullist "Left," even though it approved his major policies more enthusiastically than the Gaullist "Right...
...it has also satisfied, for obvious reasons, some of its interests...
...They have no support in the country and are unlikely ever to obtain it...
...All this was going on when the Middle East crisis broke...
...It seems that our intelligence service felt Israel would not be able to achieve air superiority and would be forced by the Arabs to fight a long war, with the attending danger of a Vietnamese type of "rot...
...These shocks have been serious for the Gaullist majority, which was already much weakened by the elections and the natural precautions being taken for the forthcoming succession...
...And so, in accordance with a nineteenthcentury idea of diplomacy, de Gaulle aligned himself with the "weaker" party in order to achieve a balance of power in the best English tradition...
...Hence, the birth of the Federation of the Left and the electoral—or maybe post° lectoral—pact with the Communists...
...And since the study and interpretation of the General's psychology are major factors in French politics, everybody is trying to figure out the causes of this disastrous series of errors...
...Pro-Israelis who paraded in the streets of Paris often chanted Israel vaincra (Israel shall win), a phrase with much the same rhythm as the Algerie Francaise of ten years ago...
Vol. 14 • November 1967 • No. 6
