Modern Times: The World From the Twenties to the Nineties (117 page)

De Gaulle’s view of the state, then, was essentially pretotalitarian. He identified the state with legitimacy, best embodied in the person of a sacral ruler. The monarch was the only individual whose personal interests were bound up inextricably, indeed organically, with the interests of the whole community, not just one or more sections of it (like a party leader). Hence the advice he gave to Queen Elizabeth II of England when she asked him about, her role in a modern society: in that station to which God has called you, be who you are, Madam! That is to say, the person in relation to whom, by virtue of the principle of legitimacy, everything in your kingdom is ordered, in whom your people perceives its own nationhood, and by whose presence and dignity the national unity is upheld.’
⁵⁹
In extremity, and for want of a better, he himself had had to take on this role in 1940: ‘de Gaulle, alone and almost unknown, had had to assume the burden of France’, as he put it. Again, in 1958, when the hideous Algeria crisis threatened France with a Spanish-type civil war, he took the role again: ‘de Gaulle,
now well-known but with no other weapon save his legitimacy, must take destiny in his hands.’
⁶⁰
He had ‘disappeared’ in 1946 with precisely this purpose, to keep ‘a pure image’, for (as he put it) ‘if Joan of Arc had married, she would no longer be Joan of Arc’.
⁶¹
He developed, indeed, the capacity to dissociate himself as a person from his public persona (’de Gaulle interests me only as a historical personality’), so that he could say: ‘There were many things I would have liked to do but could not for they would not have been fitting for General de Gaulle.’
⁶²

The logical consequence of this theory of the state was for de Gaulle to set up his own monarchy, as he undoubtedly would have done a century before. In 1958, however, he rejected monarchy in favour of a plebiscitory democracy, using referenda and (from 1962) direct universal election of a president endowed with strong actual powers as well as a transcendental symbolic role. His 1958 constitution, adopted by 17.5 million to 4.5 (with 15 per cent abstentions), and based on the Bayeux proposals, was by far the clearest, most consistent and skilfully balanced France had ever received.
⁶³
It induced, as intended, a polarization of the party system into two huge blocs of Left and Right (albeit with a four-party structure), forcing voters, on the second ballot, to make unambiguous choices. It reinvigorated the executive, enabling it to take decisions authoritatively and to pursue policies consistently. Above all, the 1962 presidential election system, approved by 13.15 million to 7.97 million, gave the head of state, bypassing the parties, a direct mandate from the entire electorate. As a result, France enjoyed the longest period of political stability in her entire modern history. It was twenty-three years from 1958 before there was, effectively, a change in governmental philosophy. Even after the victory of the Socialists in the presidential election of May 1981, the constitution continued to work smoothly, indicating that it was one for all seasons. France, like Germany, had got a first-class public framework at last.

This new stability made possible what had merely been hinted at under Vichy and the Fourth Republic: the ‘renewal’ of France. The long decadence of more than a century was not only reversed, but spectacularly seen to be reversed. In economic matters, de Gaulle proceeded with his paradoxical blend of traditionalism and modernity. The technocrat he made Chairman of the Economic Commission, and the real architect of his economic success, was Jacques Rueff, a man who placed his confidence in gold as the best available measure of value and who first put into practice the neo-conservative policies which, in the 1970s, were to become internationally fashionable under the misleading name of ‘monetarism’. Rueff’s plan of 8 December 1958 embraced deflation, severe cuts in government
expenditure, devaluation, convertibility and a ‘new franc’ at 100 times its previous value; and the plan was linked to the wholesale reduction or removal, from 1 January 1959, of external tariffs and quotas. France, in short, was delivered over to free enterprise and the market, it was the coherence and fervour of the plan,’ de Gaulle remarked later, ‘as well as its daring and ambition, which won me over.’ Its object, he told the nation on television, was to ‘establish the nation on a basis of truth and severity’.
⁶⁴

France is fundamentally a rich country; its people highly intelligent and industrious. All that is needed to make France work effectively is a stable framework and energetic leadership. Results came fast,
GNP
rose by 3 per cent in the second half of 1959, by 7.9 per cent in 1960, 4.6 in 1961, 6.8 in 1962; living standards began to improve at the rate of 4 per cent a year. For the first time since the Industrial Revolution, France became an economic pace-setter. What in effect Gaullism did was to accelerate the modest economic progress under the Fourth Republic, and then stabilize it on a high plateau, within a framework of currency stability and (by French standards) very low inflation. Exports doubled, 1956–62, and during the twenty-year period beginning 1952, industrial production tripled. The franc became a hard currency and early in 1968 French reserves reached the extraordinary total of 35,000 million (new) francs.
⁶⁵
These results accompanied and reinforced other long-term trends. Population, which had been 41 million in 1946, rose to 52 million by 1974. These new millions were better educated and housed than ever before. The number of housing units, stagnant between 1914 and 1939, increased at ten times the inter-war rate during the 1960s, so that by 1968 it numbered 18.25 million, double the 1939 number. From the 1960s, too, dated the general use of modern drugs in France and the emergence of an effective health service.
⁶⁶
The number of state secondary school teachers rose from 17,400 in 1945 to 67,000 in 1965, and the private sector (thanks to the famous
Loi Debré
, named after de Gaulle’s first prime minister) also expanded fast. High-quality mass education in France dates from the late 1950s. The number of college and university students, only 78,691 in 1939, had risen to 563,000 by 1968.
⁶⁷

Under de Gaulle, in short, France became for the first time a modern, industrialized country, in the forefront of technical progress and the assimilation of new ideas. It was the very antithesis of France in the 1930s. Such a reversal of deep historical trends is very rare in history, particularly for an old nation. It gives de Gaulle a claim to be considered the outstanding statesman of modern times. The transformation, of course, was not accomplished without pain, ugliness and shock; and protest. But the very consciousness of French
people that their country was again a dynamic force, as under the young Louis xiv or Napoleon I, reconciled them to the destruction of traditional rural France and, equally important, steeled them to the acceptance of co-partnership with Adenauer’s Germany in a European community.

De Gaulle did not share Monnet’s passion for integration and supranationality. Publicly, he always spoke of Europe as
‘l’Europe des patries’.
Yet, as always, de Gaulle’s ostensible behaviour often masked quite different and subtler aims. He remained pragmatic. He was not against larger entities for specific purposes if, within them, French interests could be more surely upheld. In spring 1950 he had pondered on the battle of the Catalonian Plains, ‘in which Franks, Gallo-Romans and Teutons jointly routed the hordes of Attila …. It is time for the Rhine to become a meeting-place and not a barrier …. If one did not force oneself to look coolly at things, one would be almost dazzled at the prospect of what German qualities and French values, extended to Africa, might jointly yield. That is a field of common development which might transform Europe even beyond the Iron Curtain.’
⁶⁸

In a sense, de Gaulle was more than a French nationalist; he was a Carolingian. He shared the view of the French historians of the new
Annales
school, like Fernand Braudel, that history is essentially determined by geography. Indeed, it was not new: it went back at least to Albert Sorel, who had argued in his great book,
L’Europe et la Révolution française
(1885), that ‘The policy of the French state was determined by geography. It was based on a fact – the empire of Charlemagne. The starting-point for the great lawsuit which fills the history of France is the insoluble dispute over the inheritance of the emperor.’
⁶⁹
From the time of Philippe le Bel, under the Valois, Henri iv and Sully, Richelieu and Mazarin, Louis xiv and into the age of Danton and Napoleon, France had sought to recreate that empire by force and under a solitary French aegis. Was it not now possible, with a truncated Germany, deprived of its non-Carolingian accretions, to recreate it peacefully, fraternally and in a non-proprietory sense? That was just the kind of pragmatic idea to appeal to de Gaulle. Unlike most modern French intellectuals, he detested Nietzsche; his approach to Germany was through Madame de Staël’s
De l’Allemagne
(1810), which began in France the cult of the ‘good’ Germans, the Westerners. He shared her passionate admiration for Goethe. He perceived in Adenauer a man who fitted into this aspect of Germany, another
homme providentiel
like himself, whose fortunate tenure of power provided an opportunity for France which might never recur. Adenauer, he wrote, was a Rhinelander,

… imbued with a sense of the complementary nature of the Gauls and the Teutons which once fertilized the presence of the Roman Empire on the Rhine, brought success to the Franks and glory to Charlemagne, provided the rationale for Austria, justified the relations between the King of France and the Electors, set Germany afire with the flame of the Revolution, inspired Goethe, Heine, Madame de Staël and Victor Hugo, and in spite of the fierce struggles in which the two peoples were locked, continued to seek a path gropingly through the darkness.

That was the spirit in which de Gaulle summoned Adenauer to his château at Colombey-les-deux-églises on 14 September 1958 for what he termed ‘the historic encounter between this old Frenchman and this very old German’.
⁷⁰

The meeting was an unqualified success. De Gaulle warmed to
der Alte
when he was told he would regain his youth in office, ‘as has been the case with myself’.
⁷¹
Adenauer approved of the Frenchman: ‘so clearly upright, correct, moral’. This was the first of forty meetings between the two men which took place in growing amity until Adenauer retired in 1962. They laid the foundation of the Franco-German axis which endured until the early 1980s. It was based upon downgrading the supranational aspects of the
EEC
while at the same time making its economic aspects work superlatively by the mutual interlocking of the French and German economies. Thus the balanced bargain, on which the success of the
EEC
depended, was turned into working reality by these two old-fashioned conservative Catholics, whose politics pre-dated the era of Christian Democracy, whose view of the world had been formed before 1914, but who had remained astonishingly alert to the changes and opportunities which the tragic events of their lifetimes had brought about. It was a genuine friendship, and an example of the way in which personalities and, still more, personal relationships, radically affect the course of international affairs.

Like many friendships, it was sealed by a common antipathy: Britain. De Gaulle did not regard Britain as a true Continental power. It was Atlanticist, ‘Anglo-Saxon’ as he put it, the junior member of that English-speaking partnership which had excluded him and France from their rightful place in the decision-making bodies of the wartime alliance. It was de Gaulle’s aim to use the Carolingian concept of the
EEC
to create in Europe an alternative centre of power to the USA and Soviet Russia. He did not wish a British intrusion which would inevitably challenge France’s claim to sit on Charlemagne’s throne. In the first decade after the war, British foreign policy had been confused and unrealistic, and made sense only on the assumption that France would remain weak and West
Germany wholly dependent on the USA. The leadership of a European federation was hers for the asking. But with a traditional cheap-food policy based on Commonwealth imports, and in the confidence of a ‘special relationship’ with America, Britain did not want such a role. At Zurich in 1946 it was Churchill himself who called for ‘something which will astonish you … a kind of United States of Europe’ based on ‘a partnership between France and Germany’. France and Germany, he said, ‘must take the lead together. Great Britain … America and I trust Soviet Russia … must be the friends and sponsors of the new Europe.’
⁷²

This condescending view was based on the assumption that Britain could still be an independent great power, occupying the unique geopolitical position a world empire had once given her: as Churchill put it (in 1950), Britain was the intersection of three overlapping circles, the English-speaking world, the Commonwealth and Europe. The assessment was barely plausible in 1950. It made no sense after Suez, which had demonstrated that neither the Commonwealth nor the ‘special relationship’ had any value in helping Britain to protect what she regarded as a vital interest. The way then pointed clearly to a European policy. Harold Macmillan, having succeeded Eden as Prime Minister in January 1957, had an opportunity to embark on an entirely fresh course and seek to join the negotiations for the still-uncompleted Rome Treaty. He missed it. He himself still had delusions of grandeur. In February 1959 he went to Moscow, as the self-appointed spokesman for the alliance,
The Times
(no doubt suitably briefed) commenting that, with President Eisenhower ‘a declining force, the German chancellor an old, unhappy man, and the French president fully preoccupied with other problems, the responsibility falling on the British prime minister to lead the alliance sensibly and yet strongly … is paramount’.
⁷³