Will de Gaulle Save France?
NIEBUHR, REINHOLD
The General faces up to promises and perils Will De Gaulle Save France? By Reinhold Niebuhr IT IS much too early to oiler any judgments on the validity, and certainly on the success, of General...
...It was the horror of the united front which persuaded Guy Mollet to become one of de Gaulle's deputies...
...The Algerian officers were disaffected particularly, if Joseph Alsop's thoughtful dispatches are to be believed, because the Spartan Algerian Army was as contemptuous of comfortable and complacent France as of the parliamentary government in which they have never believed...
...No one abhorred the latter alternative more than the Socialists who were the intended victims of this Communist parliamentary tactic...
...Where they are present in African colonies, Britain has some of the same difficulties as the French...
...He found the second alternative almost as terrifying as the first one...
...They are a budding nation...
...2. The uncertain loyalty of the Army to the Government of France...
...For him, the alternatives beyond de Gaulle were civil war or the united front...
...The ethos of the French Army has always been informed by the traditions of the ancient regime...
...There is, of course a basic defect in the plan, which is revelatory of so much French thinking...
...It obviously does not satisfy the settlers...
...Algeria is the best illustration of the latter policy...
...The Algerians would like to gain their freedom...
...It is true that he governs without Parliament, hut that body has a vacation of only six months...
...There were no British settlers but only bureaucrats in India...
...The French people have never given their wholehearted trust or implicit consent to their republican governments for the simple reason that they did not deserve it...
...The weakest part of de Gaulle's Algerian program is the vagueness with which he promises a North African federation on the one hand and integration of Algeria on the other hand...
...The cabinet also includes some excellent career men, some strong right-wingers, and de Gaulle's Bos-well, Andre Malraux...
...In order to assess the promises and perils of the French situation, let us enumerate the difficulties which de Gaulle faced: 1. A moribund parliamentary system, even more impotent in this Fourth Republic than in the Third...
...But the complexion of the cabinet is hardly the most important point in the situation...
...There are Algerians and Frenchmen, and they are molded by their French and their Moslem cultures...
...but it will satisfy the Army, giving them some of the sense of the grandeur of France, about which de Gaulle speaks so much...
...But any one who knows our pains with full integration since the Supreme Court decision will know how difficult the policy is...
...On the other hand, it has incorporated the "liberalism" of revolutionary France with the old imperialism...
...Decades of experience might have persuaded the French that the revolutionary creed that democratic governments ruled "by the consent of the governed" applied in one way to the explicit consent by which men made and unmade particular governments, but in another way to the implicit consent by which democratic people trust the form of government which allows this alternation of governments...
...This was aggravated by the fact that the irresponsible Communists represented the largest party...
...Both had despaired of solving the crisis in the old parliamentary terms and acted as middlemen between de Gaulle and the Assembly in working out the details of his extraordinary Premiership...
...The policy will be costly...
...These colons, incidentally, spell the difference between the comparative ease with which Britain liquidated an empire and France's inability to liquidate her sovereignty in Algeria...
...But unfortunately human beings have never been purely men, that is, universal men...
...3. The futile war in Algeria, in which the French economy was wrecked, in which blood flowed copiously to no effect and for which there was no prospect of a successful conclusion...
...and if de Gaulle has not succeeded by October, the Assembly will have a chance either to cancel or to renew his extraordinary powers...
...The fraternization of the Army with the Algerians put them in a quite different mood than the colons, the reactionary French settlers in Algeria, who were interested to preserve their investments at all costs...
...and they were always ready to join with the Right in bringing down a government if they could not enter it on a "united front" basis...
...They established freedom...
...This is liberalism in its most abstract form, trying to defy the historic and organic facts of life...
...This was symbolized by the resignation of General Paul Ely, the chief of staff under the Pflimlin Government, and the failure of the Government to discipline General Raoul Salan, who had an ambiguous relation to the insurrectionary forces in Algeria but who is nevertheless now de Gaulle's chief deputy in Algeria...
...By Reinhold Niebuhr IT IS much too early to oiler any judgments on the validity, and certainly on the success, of General Charles de Gaulle's effort to rescue France from civil war and remodel her constitution...
...A multiplicity of parties, with no way of making a majority which overthrew a government responsible for offering an alternative course, was the chief difficulty...
...It is significant that Parliament had to call upon de Gaulle primarily because he had an authority over the Army which the Government did not have...
...One can only say that it was sad that France did not have the political wisdom through the past centuries to fashion her political instruments in the light of empirical experience, and is now reduced to the peril of having one man write a constitution for her, which in a national plebiscite she must take or leave...
...The two policies are incompatible in the long run, and the material advantages of integration for individual Algerians will not satisfy the collective hope of national fulfilment of Algeria as a nation...
...France has, on the one hand, never digested its revolution...
...But a tentative judgment may be appropriate in the light of the fact that he is not the dictator whom the left-of-center parties feared, and that he has disappointed the hopes of the extreme Right in both France and Algeria...
...De Gaulle's policy for France is, of course, a new constitution...
...It may succeed because the alternative policy of brutal repression has been so costly and futile...
...Our policy is right, furthermore, because our Negroes are not a budding nation for whom integration means treason to their nationhood...
...Algeria and France are supposed to be wedded by a constitution and by the ideal of the "rights of man...
...and what patriotic Frenchman would not agree with him...
...It is also significant that his cabinet does not include the idol of the Algerian plotters, Jacques Soustelle, and that it does include two former Premiers from republican parties, the Catholic Pierre Pflimlin and the Socialist Guy Mollet...
...This problem proves the wisdom of Belgium in prohibiting property ownership by Europeans in the Belgian Congo...
...but they gave the nation no stability...
...She undoubtedly needs such an instrument and she needs the strong executive which de Gaulle promises to make the sine qua non of the constitution...
...The difference between the French Army and the French settlers in Algeria must have prompted de Gaulle to undertake his hazardous Algerian program of full integration...
...The traditional contempt of the Army officers for parliamentary institutions and their "babblers," overcome in great crises when confronting a common enemy, was aggravated in this present instance by the third factor in the situation which brought de Gaulle to power...
Vol. 41 • June 1958 • No. 26
