Anatomy of Gaullism

...Why Germany, rather than Britain...

...Had Britain lost the war, de Gaulle's beloved France would have shot him as a traitor...

...If Russia and America went to war, it would naturally do its best to pick up the bits...

...It seems to them indecent, as well as unjust, that the leadership of the West should have passed from ancient civilized Europe to what they consider an uncouth "ramassis" of frontiersmen and adventurers possessing neither history nor culture...

...Despite the transparent idiocy of labeling North Americans—or, for that matter, the British — "Anglo-Saxons," French schools still teach the absurd 19th century ethnic classification, later adopted by the fascists, which confused linguistic community with "race...

...For him there are only nations, each with its immutable God-given character, unswayed by ideology...

...One of the mysteries of 1958-59 was the naivete with which so many of the Americans one met here welcomed the overthrow of the Fourth Republic and de Gaulle's assumption of power...

...Gratefully, he seized upon every petty difference of opinion with Churchill, as if to satisfy his conscience and his critics that his collaboration with the "hereditary enemy" was strictly an alliance of convenience...

...Because Britain, even in its present state, would outweigh France economically and diplomatically...

...How reconcile the claim to superior enlightenment with political incapacity—with, for example, the electorate's extraordinary susceptibility to demagogy and attitudinizing...

...The suspicion grew in Paris that Macmillan was applying for EEC membership in the hope of getting himself appointed President Kennedy's bailiff within the Community...

...He is, perhaps, over-confident...

...For him, one may be sure, it was an assuagement, a personal Liberation...

...to the Right—especially the Army, still resentful of de Gaulle's Algerian policy—it was a gesture rich in significance, a gesture reinforced by an outburst of nearVichyite propaganda over the governmental radio and t? monopoly...

...Moscow radio may weep crocodile tears over poor little Britain, fulminate against the ParisBonn axis, and warn that it is being extended to Madrid...

...The American system of government is equated with British parliamentarianism because of Congressional limitations on the President's powers, and Congressmen are referred to as parlementaires...

...By that time, he is convinced, its economic and political stature will have declined satisfactorily and its usefulness to America will have vanished...

...But while it would be unwise to neglect these personal factors in de Gaulle's motivation, it would be wrong to exaggerate their importance...

...Articulate Gaullists share this view...

...For in shooting at Britain he was, quite openly, seeking to wound the United States as well...

...Right-wingers still like to repeat the old Action française dictum that "the British, having failed to subdue us by military means, took their revenge by exporting to us their poisonous parliamentary democracy...

...They did not seem to have noticed the rabid antiAmericanism of Gaullists and other Right-wingers during the previous few years, or the delight the Russians' first sputnik inspired (as a "marvelous smack in the eye for the Americans") in all segments of the French Right...

...But Germany can only be detached from America—and, in the long run, prevented from making a deal of its own with Russia—by offering it reunification...

...Here French nationalists put forward the lazily attractive thesis—attractive even to many nominal Socialists—that France's past embarrassments were due not to its own citizens' civic and intellectual shortcomings but to the intrigues of the meddling, malicious "Anglo-Saxons...

...De Gaulle was particularly vehement in regard to the British intervention which put an end to his private war with the Syrians and Lebanese—and which, however tactless certain British officers may have been, spared France an Algerian-type campaign in the Middle East...

...and it should approach Moscow directly with suggestions of its own for ending the partition of Germany...

...One important section of the Right—far more important than the innocent British ever realized—has never forgiven Britain for continuing the war in 1940 and thus wrecking the "divine surprise...

...Thus de Gaulle's need of Germany and his desire to rid Europe of American influence lead him in the same direction...

...It has long striven to maintain a cordon sanitaire of misrepresentation to keep out "AngloSaxon" viruses...

...Whatever the strategic significance of the General's nuclear force, Gaullist crystal-gazers are confident that the Russians would not attack a neutral Western Europe for fear of Chinese incursions into Siberia while their backs were turned...

...The Russians would be relieved of a major embarrassment by some such facesaving deal, and their propagandists would have little difficulty in presenting America's elimination from continental Europe as a major cold war victory...

...Ultimately the Russians themselves, disturbed by the growing obstreperousness of China, might be drawn into closer communion with the Community...

...and he has not even begun to understand why the Spanish Civil War and World War II were fought...

...In short, in place of the American deterrent, the new Europe would shelter under a Chinese one...

...American mores and politics are seen in France as a continuation of business by other means: Only profit and self-seeking count, and the individual American citizen is a mere consumer...

...Europe, "from the Atlantic to the Urals," would once more be the center of world affairs and human civilization...

...The Community would keep out of Russo-American quarrels unless European issues were involved...

...As he has shown in more than one contemptuous reference to his partners, de Gaulle believes that the difficulty of unscrambling the Community's economic omelette will force Italy, Benelux and any other state that joins, to toe his line...

...bases and pledge that the enlarged German federation would never be allowed to possess nuclear arms...

...He is unimpressed by the capacity of either species or societies to evolve...

...One might have greater sympathy for this aim were not the cemeteries of Europe already crowded with the victims of nationalism, and were the Fifth Republic less eager to brainwash its subjects with radio and TV propaganda of a grimly familiar kind...

...Nor could de Gaulle ever completely ignore the taunt of the Vichyite bourgeoisie and army that he was "London's man...

...General de Gaulle admired and was profoundly influenced by Charles Maurras, the godfather of European fascism, and the xenophobic Action française...

...Washington is in a position to do two things to strengthen the "Atlantic" wing of the European Economic Community while simultaneously lessening the attractions of neutralism to all who are impatient for a thaw in Central Europe: It should continue lobbying for a broadening—but not a dilution—of the Community to include Britain, Norway and other nations whose devotion to democracy and loyalty to their allies are less equivocal than de Gaulle's...

...With de Gaulle on the team, the West is going to make the Communists sit up and think...

...As late as the summer of 1958 a widely read Paris weekly stated that the May 13 coup in Algiers had been organized by British petroleum interests to bring de Gaulle to power...

...Right-wing Frenchmen have what they term a "moral" as well as the usual politico-economic objection to the U.S...

...has a vested interest in perpetuating the cold war, since with the American bias against Federal expenditure for social and educational purposes only a massive arms budget can save the nation from a catastrophic slump...

...They believe that the Gaullists, with typically scrupulous attention to detail, are preparing the United States Government not merely for a humiliation bigger than Britain's but for a resounding cold war reversal...

...The Italians, in particular, have been quick to point out that, economic and demographic realities being what they are, a Europe "from the Atlantic to the Urals" would be more likely to be dominated by the Kremlin than by the Elysée...

...The French Right dislikes British and American institutions and influences for both religious and political reasons...

...It is, first, the ambition of an egocentric old man to carve himself a place in history less constricted than the niche he occupied in 1940...

...and to do so by trying to restore his nation and continent to the position from which their own collective folly toppled them during the first two decades of this century...

...So why mourn for a bunch of corrupt politicians...

...but informed French Communists are hugging themselves with glee...

...He sees the new European Community he is trying to shape not as the germ of a super-power but as a constellation centered on France, giving his country the weight and authority it needs to assert itself and create a third force between the U.S...

...A European Community detached from the U.S...

...One can only hope that by now Americans are beginning to sit up and think...

...and Britain, and centered on a France unable to govern itself coherently—for Gaullism is doing nothing to strengthen the aptitude of the French for democracy— would almost certainly fall first under German, then under Soviet hegemony...

...Informed Gaullists insist that the General is serious when he says that Britain may be admitted to the European Economic Community "when she is ripe for membership...

...At last we're going to get some sense out of them...

...Germany's leaders, on the other hand, anxious above all to avoid reviving Europe's memories of Nazism, can be counted on, de Gaulle reasons, to be deferential and unassertive during the crucial five or six years that lie ahead...

...But Russia's attitude might change if Federal Germany were a constituent of a neutralist-minded European Community willing to recognize the Oder-Neisse line, conclude a non-aggression pact with Moscow, rid itself of U.S...

...It was perhaps inevitable that one day, when he had the power, de Gaulle would seek to snub and humiliate his former benefactors...

...For this hideous dependence, this dagger in the heart of his romanticism, he could never forgive Britain...

...Irritation turned to contempt in the course of 1962 when Whitehall seemed so desperate for a "special relationship" that it was willing to accept a lackey's role...

...America cannot obtain German reunification, it is argued here, because Russia will never allow East Germany to join a Federal German Republic that is a member of NATO...

...American officials and businessmen alike frowned on suggestions that de Gaulle was likely to do as much damage to the Western alliance as to French democracy...

...Many educated Frenchmen I have met—including the director of a leading newspaper and scores of university and high-school professors—believe, or affect to believe, that North Americans speak not English but "l'américain," a barbarous pidgin containing a chaotic admixture of Indian, Spanish and Yiddish words...

...De Gaulle is anti-Communist, isn't he...

...Gaullism is two things...

...France's neighbors cannot overlook the fundamental fragility of the Fifth Republic, a regime made to de Gaulle's measure and unlikely to survive him for long...

...A 19th century nationalist and fundamentalist, de Gaulle personally is not attracted to the European super-power idea...

...And reunification is obtainable only in Moscow...

...From this view, for some Gaullists it is only a very short step to the suspicion that America and Russia are fundamentally in agreement on the desirability of preventing the rise of a West European super-power that might well become their economic superior and probably have a greater cultural and political appeal to the uncommitted nations...

...Like all nationalists, he forgets that such nations as Germany and Italy, with their well-defined, supposedly immutable characters, are modern creations...

...Britain—its economy colonized, its culture moronized, its delinquency rate soaring, its whole moral and intellectual fiber flabby —is pointed to as a depressing object lesson in the dangers of Americanization...

...Some observers attribute to de Gaulle the belief that, in addition to freeing East Germany, the European Community might persuade the Russians to ease, progressively, their domination of the more Westward-inclined of their other satellites, notably Poland and Czechoslovakia...

...On the geopolitical level, Gaullists have recently adapted for their own use the old Left-wing argument that the U.S...

...Ray Alan, a frequent contributor, reports on developments in Europe, North Africa and the Middle East...

...In recent years, nothing has irritated de Gaulle and many other Frenchmen more than the British Government's toadying pursuit of a "special relationship" with America...

...they said...

...It thrives on the complexes of the ordinary citizen, troubled for longer than he cares to remember by France's instability and constant involvement in pointless and generally humiliating wars, yet taught by schoolmasters, editorialists, radio commentators and politicians that France is the most enlightened nation in the world...

...Having administered his icy douche to Whitehall and cruelly demonstrated the level to which the British Government's own fecklessness and pretensions have reduced it, he would be prepared to admit Britain to the Community in five or six years...

...To be a credible economic and political power, his Community must include Germany...

...Second—and lower down on France's political pyramid—since it offers no precise program, Gaullism is essentially a state of mind: an obsessive chauvinism nourished by the militarism, xenophobia and resentments of the classical Right...

...Even Communism, it is often said here, offers its subjects a more uplifting purpose than consumption-for-the-sakeof-consumption and gives higher priority to education and social welfare...

...Another, which includes many of de Gaulle's wartime supporters, has never reconciled itself to the fact that France's liberation should have depended to so "humiliating" an extent on the heretical, unmilitary "AngloSaxons...

...But a mischievous destiny so ordered events that de Gaulle owed his personal, political and military fulfillment to the nation Maurras considered l'ennemi héréditaire—to British sponsorship and support at a time (1940-41) when the majority of Frenchmen were indifferent or hostile to him...

...and Russia...

...And an American foot in the Community's door was the last thing de Gaulle wanted...

...Washington is thus, quite consciously, Moscow's ally in freezing the present humiliating partition of Europe...

...The French have never been able to govern themselves without a strong man on top...