De Gaulle: Heritage and Prospects

...The title indicates one and the subtitle, "De Gaulle's Heritage and Prospects," the other...

...Foreign policy is the author's subject and he handles it clearly and competently...

...Popular support for European unity "masked public indifference," yet a few lines earlier it was a force which politicians could not ignore...

...The rest of the book is far less satisfactory...

...Furniss's understandable distrust of the Army makes it all the stranger that he should swallow whole its propaganda against the politicians...

...This is regrettable, for much work has gone into it and much useful information is scattered through it...

...Occasionally the author's style (and thought) lapse into barbarities such as: "Like immobilisme, the relation between foreign policy and public opinion had the further advantage of being consistent with the nature of French society...

...On Algeria he is particularly unsatisfactory...

...His wholesale condemnation of the Fourth Republic produces other contradictions...

...I am afraid the result will do more to reinforce old prejudices than to spread new enlightenment about de Gaulle's heritage and prospects...

...I neither consider the French Assembly's majority of 55 votes against the European Defense Community (EDC) "small," nor regard that vote as "the zenith of immobilisme" (but rather a reaction against it), nor believe that then-Premier Pierre Mendes-France could have reversed it, nor do I agree that it misrepresented public opinion...

...An academic writer may legitimately deplore French torture and repression, but if he wishes to be taken seriously he should not attribute it to "despair" at confronting "a people in arms," with no hint that the National Liberation Front (FLN) was killing, by murder and not in battle, some 250 civilians a month, five-sixths of them Moslems...

...But differences of interpretation do not invalidate his generally sound and useful account of French foreign policy...

...Again, for the elections of the following November, de Gaulle deliberately chose the electoral system preferred by the Left in the (vain) hope of minimizing the expected victory of the Right...

...Inaccuracies are frequent: For instance, there are at least six slips in the discussion of the Constitution...

...By omitting the real reasons for the choice of an electoral system, and describing the Moderates as "clinging to the UNR skyrocket," Furniss misses or obscures the main points...

...Furniss says this famous warning concerned "the delicate situation in Corsica...

...The Fourth Republic's economic policy ends in bankruptcy, receiving no credit for what the author calls later the "fundamental soundness of the French economy," which was certainly no heritage of the previous regime...

...On this foundation Furniss then builds another 180-page book on the advent and possibilities of Charles de Gaulle's Fifth Republic...

...A straightforward account of postwar French foreign policy occupies half the book...

...The first book is far better than the second...

...He naturally concentrates on the German problem, describing succinctly and lucidly the reasons for France's changing attitudes—from its efforts to dominate Germany, to attempts to absorb it in a united Western Europe, and then to close and direct collaboration with it...

...For example, in May 1958 the crucial moment came when de Gaulle, believing a military descent on Paris imminent, announced on the 27th (at noon, not at 5 PM as Furniss says) that he was forming a government, and urged everyone, particularly the armed forces, to maintain order...

...Co-author, "De Gaulle's Republic" EDGAR FURNISS has written two books under one cover...

...thus, in the long chapter on May 1958, Furniss quotes none of the many books available...

...Some failures of explanation, judgment or clarity suggest complete misunderstanding...

...He may well find that such special powers as allowing suspects in France to be interned are "shocking in a country reputedly dedicated to freedom...

...Mendes-France is commended for recognizing the inevitable, then blamed for the defeat of the EDC...

...The two-to-one popular majority for the treaty in a 1952 poll, cited by Furniss, had evaporated by the 1954 poll—held just before the Assembly's vote— which he omits...

...Furniss accepts the Army's complaint that it was starved of funds—yet, a dozen pages earlier, condemns Paris for dissipating the nation's resources on grandiose foreign policies...

...the first 113 pages take it up to 1954, and several rather breathless chapters then briefly summarize domestic and colonial developments since that date, with special reference to their implications for foreign policy...

...And there are three major mistakes about Mendes-France—who fell from power in 1955 because he tried to reach a settlement in Tunisia, not because he failed, who did not grant "substantial independence" (or any other kind) to Morocco, and who left the Mollet Government in May 1956 after 16 weeks, not in May 1957 after 16 months...

...His judgments also can be disputed...

...Finally, he cites Plan-chais' account of the Army's difficulties with student organizations to demonstrate the Army's utter failure with French youth—omitting the same author's comments, on the previous page of the same book, concerning the complete success of the military in assimilating their 25 per cent of Communist conscripts...

...Furniss seems to have written one book based on reflection and experience, and then tacked on another, more topical, to which insufficient thought and care have been devoted...

...He intervened to discourage any alliance between the Right-wing Moderate party and the new Gaullist party, the Union for the New Republic (UNR)—which, incidentally, was not formed "quickly after the May revolt," but in October—and in consequence their rivalry dominated the campaign and the new Assembly...

...But for recent events it seems to rely wholly on newspaper sources...

...The author was so impressed with the draft riots of four years ago that he has discovered them to be "recurrent...

...General Navarre's celebrated (and partly just) attack on French political leadership is quoted quite uncritically, for all the world as if the Army had no responsibility for Dien-bienphu...

...but his judgment would carry more weight if he had seen fit to mention the cause: the ghastly war between rival Algerian nationalists which was then slaughtering Moslems in France at the rate of three a day...

...Retreats are said to have been forced on the army by the political authorities, although in Indo-China the soldiers had to warn Mendes-France that they could hold out for only two more weeks, and in Tunisia the chief of staff advised the Government that political conciliation was a military necessity...

...Furniss even claims that the FLN recognized the International Red Cross Convention, while in fact, of course, the Red Cross has repeatedly protested against the FLN's refusal even to give it a list of its prisoners, let alone access to them...