The Atlantic and Its Enemies

that the institutions had to be radically changed for some sensible solution to these interminable conflicts to be found, as after all the British had, more or less, managed. Vietnam stood in very stark contrast to Malaya, where the British had had to fight a long and difficult war but had been very careful to cultivate local allies who were essential to the winning of it. The fact was that a great many of the politicians more or less agreed that the institutions were absurd, and asked only to be put out of their misery in a dignified way. There was some screeching alarmism. The president of the Council of Europe, a standard-issue Belgian socialist, set the tone for many such pronouncements in the future and announced that ‘I am struck by the analogy between the Algiers insurrection and the beginnings of Franco in Spain.’ Some French opponents, and the official Communist Party, spread alarms as to a new version of the Second Empire or even of Vichy France. To that, de Gaulle had an easy answer: he was sixty-seven, not an age at which a man aspires to be dictator. In fact he was soon joined by great numbers of politicians from several parties. He agreed, for form’s sake, to address the existing assembly, did so briefly and to the point: there was crisis in everything. A new constitution was needed, with a strong executive. He was given full powers. A referendum in September endorsed what he did, and the ‘yes’ vote included about one third of the Communists’ usual number.

Changing constitutions — as French experience showed — is not always worth the effort. As Benjamin Constant, one of the many wise defeated liberals whom France produced, remarked, ‘on change de situation mais on transporte dans chacune les tourments dont on esperait se delivrer’. But in this case the constitution also represented a France that was becoming very different indeed from the France of the nineteenth century and of the interwar period. There were children; the rural masses were being broken up; industry could develop even with German competition and there were new sources of energy to supplement France’s none-too-many and none-too- rich coal mines. The historic problem, that the Right was divided, was being overcome. With de Gaulle, a conservative element became united enough at last to form a stable government (though the name of the party changed, over and over again, from UNR (Union pour la Nouvelle Republique) to RPR (Jacques Chirac’s Rassemblement pour la Republique) and whatever). It had its dissidents, but the power of the presidency was such that the spoils of office which had made governments so unstable before were now transferred in effect to the Elysee Palace and a coterie round presidents. Spoils of office remained, but at least there was governmental continuity.

Given as much, the Algerian problem was solved in so far as its abolition can be described as a solution: the pieds noirs, almost all of them, left in 1962. When he went to Algeria, de Gaulle had given a strong impression that he would fight for Algerie francaise, and he proclaimed economic measures that would contain some of the disastrous unemployment that came partly from the sheer terror of the war, and partly from the demographic explosion on the Moslem side. But after a year he was outlining a new policy: Algeria for the Algerians. At that, the army started to rebel again and de Gaulle produced another of his masterpieces: a television address — he practised his quite extraordinary style with much care, to be fondly remembered ever after by caricaturists — in which he began, ‘Eh bien, mon cher et vieux pays’, appealing for popular support. The army leaders were isolated in Algiers, much of the army dissociating itself, and they backed down. In control, de Gaulle could now move towards a settlement with the Algerian rebels, with whom there had been secret negotiations in Switzerland. He could always threaten that, if they went too far, the country could be partitioned, the French retaining a coastal strip. In the event, in July 1962, France recognized Algeria, retaining some rights over the Sahara oil. There had been a final outburst from the unrelenting elements in the army, four senior figures carrying out a putsch in 1961 and then going underground, striking out brutally and almost at random. But they had no future: nor perhaps did they want or expect one. In the summer of 1962, under a broiling sun, a million French settlers now left, leaving Algeria to an unhappy future.

9. Europe 1958

General de Gaulle is supposed to have said, when Algeria left, that the moment had come for ‘Europe’. There, France would be remade. It mattered that French self-confidence had taken a battering in the middle of the 1950s. French post-war aims, of taking over German resources, had been frustrated, and the Monnet Plan had not worked, at least not in the intended sense. There was a constant shortage of dollars for imports, and the franc was devalued again and again. This all became much worse because of the political system. It reflected the concerns of the old France, and the politicians of 1945 were scared enough by the authoritarian ways of the Vichy regime — and the potential authoritarianism of de Gaulle — not to want a strong executive. The parliamentarians kept decisive powers in their own hands, and arranged for a powerless presidency. This was made worse because the party that held the balance of power — the Radicals — had not been solid. Even their constitution said that they were in effect allowed to split, and they reflected local realities that often had little to do with national matters. Snap votes could destroy a government’s majority, if a prime minister were inept, and a government crisis would duly follow. Then the politicians failed to agree, and governments kept changing in a way that might have been harmless if times were easy, but now appeared ridiculous. There was one government after another — when the final crisis of the Fourth Republic began on 15 April 1958 it was the seventeenth or the twenty-second, depending upon how you define ‘crisis’. Five weeks went by before a Felix Gaillard assembled a thin majority to replace a Maurice Bourges- Maunoury on 5 November 1957, and the crisis that began with Gaillard’s overthrow on 15 April 1958 had still not been resolved when the final act of the Fourth Republic began on 13 May. As the historian Rene Remond comments, there was a sort of liturgy involved as each of the participants — president, party leaders, etc. — knew how the ceremonial went, and it developed its own vocabulary: lifting the mortgage, wiping the slate, testing the slopes, sending back the lift, etc. Karl Marx, asked why it was that the non-socialists produced so many divisions, answered, thunderously, ‘It is in the nature of the petty bourgeoisie to be subjective. ’ The Algerian affair brought about change, at last (as, curiously enough, the beginnings of French rule there, in 1830, had coincided with a domestic half-revolution).

The chief beneficiary of Gaullism was generally the bourgeoisie. This expression covered much more than its nearest equivalent, ‘middle class’, could possibly do in English. It had been the dominant class of the earlier Third Republic, had supplanted the aristocracy, and had been more different from it than had the English middle classes. Alain Besancon’s Une generation manages to paint that world in brief sketches: there is a great deal of property, with a very large private house in Paris, grandmothers in grand flats, on the rue du Faubourg-Saint-Honore and the boulevard de La-Tour-Maubourg, driven in a Hispano-Suiza; and there are two country properties, one with hundreds of acres of grounds, well laid out by devoted gardeners. There is a whole familia of servants; and young Besancon gets to know the endless varieties of pears (Williams, beurres Hardy, beurres Lebrun, the doyennes du Comice, etc.). As he says, though he is not quite clear what ‘bourgeoisie’ means, it is simply not present in any literature other than French. He describes it as a matter of language and dress; it was a matter of family, too, the aristocracy being much more distant with each other. It was also a happy business, with much to do. Richard Cobb remembers the same phenomenon though he encountered it in a different form. He was sent at fifteen in the mid-thirties to a family that looked after him devotedly, and fell in love with France; then, after the war, he fell in with two eccentric brothers bizarrely occupying a house near the Lycee Saint- Louis (‘grimmest of Paris schools’). Bourgeois France went through a bad time: the killing fields of 1914, the interwar Depression (which gave France negative growth rates longer than in any other major country), and then the years of Occupation and Vichy, which led almost to its collapse. Besancon remembered the period of the fifties as ‘sale et pauvre’; the house yards uneven, plaster falling off, the porters’ kitchen foul-smelling, of cabbage and urine; 40-watt bulbs were used in the cafes, hanging from a wire, and their lavatories were of the Turkish type, with thick newspaper on a string; even the coffee was muddy and the wine was vinegary. It had been the end of a period of disaster when the bourgeois certainties had gone by the board. But with de Gaulle these returned in a peculiar way: there was a distinct bourgeois revival, partly based on glossy state institutions, and partly on the newly successful world-class economic activities. The new Citroen DS, majestically inflating as it was started up, was as much a symbol of sixties Paris as had been the canvas-and-tin deux chevaux of the fifties.

Now that de Gaulle had united the historically divided Right enough to establish a durable government, quite soon France was going to overtake England, for the first time since the French Revolution itself. Charles de Gaulle