Forty years ago, Charles de Gaulle was observing the 10th anniversary of his government, and of his (Fifth) Republic. He had proposed a referendum in the reorganization of local government and university administration. Though complicated, as only French referendum questions can be, it was a movement toward participatory democracy and was ahead of parallel movements in most other advanced democracies.
De Gaulle departed on a state visit to Romania, to destabilize the Soviet empire. (Destabilization of something, as in Canada the year before, was by now the chief purpose of his elaborate state visits.) His able prime minister, Georges Pompidou, departed on his own state visit to Afghanistan.
A ripple of student agitation and discontent started. There were boycotts of lectures in some of the main Paris university campuses, and some occupations of public buildings, including, most famously, the Odeon theatre. This was in emulation of the widespread contemporary American practice of university protest against the Vietnam War and its encroaching draft calls. Their French analogues had no such pressing grievance. De Gaulle, who was never reluctant to blame problems on the Anglo-Saxons, dismissed the antics of the students as another noxious importation from America.
Sporadic public- and private-sector labour walkouts began while de Gaulle was still in Romania. (When the students marched en masse to "meet the workers," however, they were rebuffed: As is usually the case, the workers regarded the students as degenerate slackers and poseurs.) De Gaulle was then by far the most accomplished and admired active Western statesman. In the whole world, only Mao Tse-tung (as his name was then spelled) was a leader of comparable stature. They were the last of the gigantic national leaders of the mid-20th century, having outlasted the democratic Churchill and Roosevelt and the totalitarian Stalin and Hitler.
De Gaulle was all that had salvaged the integrity of France in its darkest hour of 1940. As the last government of the Third Republic capitulated to Nazi Germany, de Gaulle (only a two-star general and associate war minister) "assumed France," as he put it, and came to England to continue the war. He was, Mr. Churchill wrote, "carrying with him, in his little airplane, the honour of France" (so little of it remained). Yet by 1968, he was too knowledgeable and cynical to expect much gratitude from his countrymen, and had famously said that he loved France but didn't especially care for the French.
During his presidency, he cleverly aligned France's interests with those of the principal allies, while representing France with an obstreperous rigour that made no concession to the military defeat of the country and the contemptible collaboration with Nazi Germany of its ostensible government and much of its population.
On the day of the liberation of Paris, August 26, 1944, de Gaulle launched the myth that France, except for a few traitors, had fought bravely through the war on the front lines and had largely liberated itself. This was naturally embraced by conventional French opinion as a face-saving legend, even as General Eisenhower's armies cleared France and swept into Germany.
De Gaulle had warned France that the post-war Third Republic would lead to absurdly unstable government and that its colonial policy, particularly in Indochina, would fail. He predicted, even when he had almost no public support, that he would shortly be called upon to resurrect France as a politically serious country, and as the last stop before the Communists. This is exactly what happened in 1958.
He established the Fifth Republic, which effectively combined the two contesting traditions of French public life: a monarchical chief of state with extensive powers and a renewable seven-year term, in what was styled a republic. He extracted France from the Algerian War, developed nuclear weapons, ended centuries of animosity with Germany and quickly made France one of the most geopolitically important countries in the world by skilfully playing an aggregation of confidence tricks with the superpowers.
France was a foul-weather friend of the United States and its allies, but was otherwise destructive of the Western Alliance, particularly the English-speaking countries; and enticed the Russians as fellow European resisters to U.S. hegemony. (He never accepted the durability of communism in Russia or China.) In addition to being the greatest French leader since Napoleon, by his soaringly elegant prose, as a writer and orator, he was also an important cultural figure.
De Gaulle was aware of the propensity of the French to erect barricades from time to time and hurl paving stones at the police, as if from boredom or even guilt at living so well in such a rich, civilized and cultured country. As disorder spread in the spring of 1968, he was also aware that eventually French bourgeois avarice would reassert itself.
Ten million people were soon on strike. The Communist red flag or anarchist black flag flew over almost every factory. The police director of Paris (who had held the same position intermittently for 30 years, including during the German occupation) told de Gaulle the police were no longer reliable.
The president made his move. He visited the main French army commander on the Rhine, legendary paratroop general Jacques Massu, and assured himself of the loyalty of the most battle-hardened and notoriously heavy-handed divisions of the French army. Then, finally, he spoke to the nation, for less than five minutes, on May 30.
France's public broadcasting network was on strike, so there was only a still photograph of the president on the screen while he spoke. He began: "As the sole legitimate repository of republican power, I have in the last 24 hours considered every means, I repeat every means, for the conservation of that power." He would fulfill his mandate, had already dissolved the National Assembly and would not dismiss the prime minister "who has earned the homage of all." Elections would take place on the constitutional timetable "unless there is an attempt to gag the French people and prevent the voters from voting, by the same means that the workers have been prevented from working, the teachers from teaching and the students from studying: by intimidation, intoxication and tyranny."
De Gaulle effectively declared martial law and implicitly threatened the direct intervention of the army. He imputed the disorders to "totalitarian communism," with the complicity of "discredited politicians who would not ultimately have more influence than the little they deserve … France is threatened by dictatorship. The nation will not abdicate. Freedom will triumph. Vive la France!"
That morning, 500,000 people had marched down the Champs Elysées demanding that de Gaulle resign. In the late afternoon, 750,000 marched back up the same avenue, many doubtless veterans of the earlier promenade, demanding that he remain. All the workers, students, teachers and professors went quietly back to their occupations, without violence or extensive vandalism. Two months later, the Gaullists won the greatest electoral victory in 175 years of sporadic Republican French history.
De Gaulle's personal campaign consisted of one televised interview, with a very well-rehearsed questioner, in which he said that he was the true revolutionary. He asked where these others had been when he founded and led the resistance against the Nazis; when he had saved the country from civil war and chaos; and (unfortunately) when he had "obtained the beginning of the liberation of the French of Canada." (This spurious cause, in which the French had not the slightest interest, and inexplicably for such a gifted geo-strategist, was one of the chief infatuations of the general's last years.)
The year 1968 was a tempestuous time of upheavals, invasion (Czechoslovakia), and assassinations (Martin Luther King, Robert Kennedy). The collapse of constitutional government in France would have been a disaster for the West. The salvation of France as a functioning democracy and the phoenix-like survival of the West's then-greatest statesman is what should be celebrated now; not the mindless posturings of the superannuated left's misplaced youth.
James Morton
1100 - 5255 Yonge Street
Toronto, Ontario
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