The Atlantic and Its Enemies

was truly the man of the decade. As he said in his memoirs, in one of the great first lines of literature, all his life he had had a certain idea of France, and now, in his late sixties, he would restore her greatness. He had gone through the First World War, had been wounded and taken prisoner, had lived through the humiliations of the thirties, when Paris became, in George Orwell’s words, half brothel, half museum. Then had come defeat in 1940, and the German occupation. De Gaulle, going to London with a few companions, had kept the idea of France going, and had become in 1944 the man of the hour. He had repeated the feat in 1958, and, by 1962, a great man known around the globe, he would give France the self-confidence and influence which in his opinion his country deserved. This was very far from being fanciful. France was one of very few European countries from which people did not emigrate: quite the contrary, many foreigners wanted to move there, whether Italians and Spaniards in search of employment, or Englishmen anxious to escape from the taxes and the weather and the babyish restrictions back home. Literature, film, wine, history — everything spoke for France. There had been one long-term problem, again a uniquely French experience, in that her people since the great Revolution had made fewer and fewer babies. In the seventeenth century there had been more Frenchmen than Russians, but by 1914 there were almost five times as many Russians (or subjects of the Tsar). Why, is a good question: the answer is probably to be found in the French Revolution, which gave land to the peasant, and the Code Napoleon which forcibly divided inheritances among children. There was enough to keep one child, and the size of the farm meant that only one extra pair of hands was needed, while only one extra mouth could be fed. In the slump of the thirties, as everywhere else, parents stopped producing babies, and the French population hardly went up, except through immigration, after 1870. The war, and the Occupation, changed this, for mysterious reasons: in 1949 there were almost a million births, one third more than in 1939, which was itself one of the better years for births, and by 1960 the young in France once more outnumbered the old. Families now produced three children, not one. De Gaulle, though himself elderly, spoke for a new generation, and French self-confidence began to recover.

De Gaulle’s prestige ran very high because, since 1958, France had flourished, and this was shown in the very considerable power of his new presidential office. In the summer, there had been consultation over a new constitution, which was supposed to do away with the political swings-and-roundabouts of the Third and Fourth Republics. Then, because the politicians did not want an authoritarian figure as head of state, the presidency was a mainly ceremonial office. Now, the president had much greater power (the historian Jean Lacouture remarked that the executive had such power that ‘this republic’ tends to be ‘on the frontiers of the democratic world’). The prime minister in the Matignon Palace also had power, though less of it, and there was a potential for conflict, but in 1958 this did not matter. De Gaulle had the constitution approved by an enormous majority with a referendum. On 21 December 1958 he got nearly 80 per cent of the vote, as president. On the whole he chose resistance men for his team, and Georges Pompidou, though now at the Rothschild Bank, was marked with great favour as he did as he was told.

Once in office, de Gaulle ran affairs in grand style (he once terminated an interview when the woman journalist crossed her legs), though often with a human touch, like a good commander-in-chief keeping up with his men. He also disciplined his time: curiously enough he used to read Le Monde cover to cover, though he did not regard it as ‘national’ and generally disliked the press. He loved the James Bond films and television in the evening but also kept up with his reading, always punctiliously thanking in his own hand authors who sent their books. Someone said of him that in moments of idleness he was like a Henry Moore statue. Twice a year was the press conference, when de Gaulle would speak for up to one and a half hours, very well-rehearsed beforehand, and exhausting, like a theatrical performance or, as his press secretary said, like a woman giving birth. On television he had ‘the eyes of an elephant’ and a face like Rodin’s Balzac. His courage was not in dispute, and at Kennedy’s funeral he behaved characteristically — waving aside the insistent offer of an armour-plated limousine so that he could walk at the side of Kennedy’s widow and son, when other statesmen behaved with self-preserving prudence. At any rate, an indisputable charisma.

He himself was such a figure as to conceal the possible problems — that power would be transferred from a fractious and difficult assembly to a presidential court, far less visible from the outside, and therefore likely to be very corrupt; and there was a further problem that, without formal opposition, informal opposition in the streets would grow — as was to happen, within a few years. But de Gaulle himself was utterly incorruptible (in the fifties his wife had discreetly made ends meet by selling heirloom silver as she otherwise had to make do on a colonel’s pension). A. J. P. Taylor rightly noted that only one man in French politics had emerged from office significantly poorer, de Gaulle, and one man in English politics significantly richer, Lloyd George (since then, Blair has joined the little list). Even then there were complaints that the State dominated the media, especially television, and at one ceremony foreign journalists — hated figures, given the Algerian problem — were kicked and manhandled. In the event, even Communists voted ‘yes’: the total ‘no’ vote being a million short of their own 5,500,000 in the elections. There followed the lengthy effort at peace in Algeria together with self-assertion in matters European, and this marked the whole presidency.

The November elections of 1958 proceeded in a two-stage form that greatly damaged the Left — though even now a problem emerged, that there were two conservative or right-of-centre parties, de Gaulle’s UNR with almost 200 seats, and a second group with 132. They had won under two fifths of the vote, but had two thirds of the new assembly, and were therefore not forced into unity of action. In time, this was to become a problem. The French Right was given to splitting, as some would-be stalwart, feeling slighted, would round up the out-ins against the loyalists, and even launch a new party which, by making a nuisance of itself, could menace the government’s existence. Such was the basis of the career of Valery Giscard d’Estaing and of several others since. However, de Gaulle commanded by his presence, and there was also a distinct strategy: in effect, the old resistants stepped into the shoes of the unlovely Vichy technocrats. The first prime minister, Michel Debre, was an old resistant who in the end could not follow de Gaulle’s policy in Algeria, but who loyally carried through the first measures. It had been obvious since 1945 that inflation and protectionism went together with institutional trade union power, itself heavily under Communist influence, and the new government, installed in the summer of 1958, had a priority to change matters radically. Georges Pompidou, who had started life as a French teacher, had moved into banking and was now Debre’s chief of staff, had as much in mind, and the new finance minister was the rigid Antoine Pinay (de Gaulle did not much care for him but he did have the confidence of the financial world). His chief idea was to make the franc stable, and to dismantle the protectionism that allowed such inefficiency in French industry.

De Gaulle had little time for economics, and saw it in terms of national confidence. Pinay was dry and prudent (he even objected to the plan being launched in his name, but was overruled by the General); the real architect of the reform was the perennially right-but-repulsive Jacques Rueff, and his priority was to stop inflation. An immediate loan was launched, successfully, and a team of experts set about the problem of the franc, recognizing that no country with self-respect could tolerate more than two zeroes on the notes. But that meant far deeper changes: the Bank of France (and the nationalized banks in general) must not go on giving preferential medium- term credit at low interest rates for industry and housing; the Treasury should just take money from the market, now that one existed. The Rueff reform took a line in financial stabilization that has been familiar since 1923, when Dr Hjalmar Schacht took it in Germany; budget decreases, tax increases, a liberalization of foreign trade and a devaluation of 15.45 per cent. It is political arithmetic, dressed up, and is currently called the ‘Washington consensus’. But the whole was accompanied by a measure that caught the world’s attention — introduction of the ‘heavy franc’, at 100 to one. Now, with a money that could be converted at will, producers were to be stimulated by competition, and this indeed was to happen: France created some world-class industrial concerns in a short time. The five socialists wanted to resign, but de Gaulle browbeat Guy Mollet into staying on patriotic grounds. The General was by now a master of television performance: he understood that ham acting was his stock-in-trade but he ‘sold’ the plans: without them, he said, ‘we would remain a backward country, perpetually between crisis and second-rateness’.

In a descant on similar German debates as to Marshall and Erhard, the economic recovery of France divides opinion. Was it caused by the Monnet Plan, and the devastating omniscience of the great and good? Certainly, there were institutions to give a strategy to the new self-confidence. In 1962 the reputation of the Plan stood high. Intelligent technocrats had, it appeared, waved a wand, and French backwardness was no more; nuclear energy heated and lit, where coal had once been too poor in quantity and quality to do anything of the kind; there was a French bomb as well. The specialist ‘great schools’ took the best and the brightest, and trained them for the job of managing the State — the Polytechnic, a military institution, to produce engineers; the National School of Administration to produce civil servants who understood town planning or transport or energy, whereas in England