Portraits and Miniatures (16 page)

The first presidential elections under the new system did not take place for another three years and then, ironically, gave a much less satisfactory result for its instigator than had the old system in 1959. He started in an apparently commanding position, but was placed
en ballotage
by the combined votes of his two opponents, Mitterrand and Lecanuet. On the first round de Gaulle got 44 per cent against 32 per cent for Mitterrand and 16 per cent for Lecanuet. On the second he got 54.5 per cent against Mitterrand's 45.5 per cent. It was decisive but not glorious. Then in the spring of 1967 the Gaullists lost their independent majority in the Assembly.

The next significant elections were the legislative ones of June 1968. They followed the disastrous month of May, when student riots eliding into industrial unrest led to the collapse of de Gaulle's nerve and to his putting on a very passable imitation of Louis XVI's flight to Varennes. Louis XVI got only to the edge of Champagne by coach but de Gaulle got to Baden-Baden by helicopter, where, according to General Massu and to some extent to Lacouture following Massu, it required a bracing lecture from Massu, one of the old Algiers junta of 1958, promoted to commander
of the French occupation forces in Germany, to turn him round. It was amazing in view of the far more awesome dangers de Gaulle had faced in 1940 and afterwards that he should have cracked so badly. Maybe it was a classic example of the rule that nobody is much good in his second decade of continuous office (it was actually his 120th month). Maybe Massu exaggerated his own role and de Gaulle always intended the retreat to Baden-Baden as a tactic that would give him the advantage of surprise on the rebound. Whatever the reason, he returned fortified, and with his return there was a dramatic and favourable reversal of the situation. One result of this reaction was the electoral triumph of a month later. The Gaullists moved to a substantial absolute majority, but de Gaulle himself remained wounded and vulnerable. Ten months afterwards, when he forced an unnecessary referendum on a couple of minor ill-matched and unpersuasive constitutional questions, he lost by a margin of 5 per cent and resigned within six hours.

There is no close link between the fluctuating combination of daring, vision and irresponsibility that marked de Gaulle's performance as President and these ups and downs of electoral fortune. He was consistent in working always for the greater glory of France, but by no means predictable in the means he employed to this end. He loved
coups de théâtre
and the surprise of paradox. Perhaps he remained a natural tank commander who believed that the unexpected approach was half the battle. Out of government he had opposed European integration and the Treaty of Rome. In office he found that Pflimlin, the man of Strasbourg who was later to be President of the European Parliament, had sent Maurice Faure, a great orator of the European cause, round the capitals of the other five original members to warn them that France could not meet the 1 January 1959 deadline for the dismantling of customs barriers. By December 1958 he was able to reverse that policy of hesitant weakness and say that France, after all, would be ready. His devaluation and subsequent stabilization of the franc made France fit to participate in and to benefit from the Common Market.

Then he achieved an almost mystical rapprochement with
Adenauer and laid the foundations of the Franco-German partnership which was to lead Europe for the next thirty years. In early 1963 he scuppered Macmillan and displeased Italy, Benelux and half the German Government, but not Adenauer, by consigning Britain to
le grand large.
And in 1965, with Adenauer gone, he brought the first phase of the Common Market to a juddering halt with his quarrel with Hallstein, the presumptuous (as he thought) German President of the Commission.

His Algerian policy was both a greater reversal of alliances and his most signal presidential service to France. The conditions for his coming to power had been created by a cabal of generals who thought that the politicians of the Fourth Republic were hopelessly wet in their weak underpinning of the permanence of
Algérie Française,
and over the next four years he proceeded to show that they were indeed hopelessly wet because they would never have had the courage to sever the link and get the poison of
la sale guerre
out of the veins of France. De Gaulle did precisely this, and in the course of doing so employed one of the most memorable ambiguities in the history of politics. When he looked at the hysterical crowd of
pieds noirs
outside the Governement- Général in Algiers on the evening of 4 June 1958 and said ‘
Je vous ai compris,'
it was interpreted as a commitment of support, may well have been delivered with mixed emotions at the time, but turned out to be a disdainful dismissal.

Freed of the incubus of Algeria and responding unexpectedly well to the stimulus of the Common Market, France enjoyed a period of rapid growth, currency stability and mounting prosperity in which much of the work done by Monnet's
Commissariat du Plan
under the Fourth Republic redounded to the credit of the Fifth. But it was due to de Gaulle that its benefits did not drain away into the sands of Algeria and that the new France had the political panache to turn the economic success into international influence. At first de Gaulle, while preaching against too much subservience to an American-dominated NATO, played a hard cold war hand at moments of crisis. When the Berlin Wall was built in 1961 he was the only Western leader in favour of reacting with force. In 1962 when Kennedy confronted Khrushchev in the
Cuban missile crisis he was more forthright in his support than either Macmillan or Adenauer. From 1963 onwards, however, with the Algerian war behind him and with the Khrushchev threat greatly reduced after Cuba, he began to take an increasingly anti-American line: on Vietnam; on the growing weakness of the dollar, which made the United States' assumption of currency hegemony increasingly intolerable; on the nuclear test ban treaty; on the independent cultivation of relations with both China and the Soviet satellites; and on the attempt to build up a special French position in South America.

On some of these points de Gaulle was more sensible than Washington. But in his last years of power he began to go over several tops. Nineteen sixty-seven was a vintage year. In June, at the time of the Six-Day War, he switched from the traditional French pro-Israeli line and half-denounced the Jews as ‘an élite people, self-confident and dominating'. In July he went to Canada and proclaimed
le Québec libre
from the balcony of the Montreal City Hall. His visit had to be cut short before he got to Ottawa. In September he went to Poland and there made remarks almost as offensive to the Soviet Union as his Quebec ones had been both to Ottawa and to Washington. In October he was actively supporting the Biafran revolt against the Nigerian Government, a policy that was regarded as hostile in both London and Washington. In November he dismissed Britain's second application to join the European Community before the negotiations had even opened. Later that same month he encouraged his Chief of Defence Staff to announce that the French nuclear deterrent would be
à tous azimuts,
in other words targeted in all directions, including America. (No French missile could have begun to reach there, but that introduced bathos rather than moderation into the proposition;
tous azimuts
did, however, help to give the French deterrent support
from
all directions, including the Communist Party, within France.)

Inside as well as outside France ‘the shipwreck of old age' was felt to be beginning. He was seventy-seven, much younger than Adenauer had been at the end of his Chancellorship but wearing less well. And so it proved to be. The year of 1968 was downhill
nearly all the way; 1969 was a year of defeat and resignation, followed by six weeks of retreat in Ireland and a coldly unhelpful attitude towards the presidency of Georges Pompidou, who had been his Prime Minister throughout six years of great Fifth Republican success. Nineteen seventy brought almost complete solitude (except for the company of his wife) at Colombey, rather hasty work on his second and post-1958 series of memoirs, and sudden death, at an age two weeks short of eighty, on 9 November. ‘France is a widow,' said Pompidou in what was probably the best phrase of his life. He could not compete with de Gaulle in that or many other respects, but nor could any other figure of the mid-twentieth century, except for his two old enemies/allies, Churchill and Roosevelt.

This is a lightly edited version of a lecture given in the Examination Schools at Oxford in February 1990. It was part of a series organized for the centenary of Newman's death. All the other participants were considerable Newman and/or theological scholars. I was asked as Chancellor of the University: hence the occasionally defensive tone.

I Have Found the preparation of this lecture one of the most formidable tasks I have ever undertaken, and am inclined to the view that my sense of cancellarian duty to the University -which I interpret as meaning that I should not refuse a serious engagement which it is physically possible for me to fulfil - has led me to take leave of my senses. A few months ago I knew little about Newman, beyond the facts he was a Trinity undergraduate, an Oriel fellow in the years when that college led the awakening from the Oxford slumber of the eighteenth century, and Vicar of St Mary's. I had some vague knowledge of his part in the launching of the Oxford Movement and of his retreat to Littlemore.

Forty years ago, which is nearly a third of the time back to his sojourn there, I addressed an election meeting in the Anglican schoolroom at Littlemore, but got little response from the small and stolid audience for what I hoped was my felicitous reference to their former parish priest. I think I would have got the correct year for his conversion to Rome, but I was hazy about the exact date of his move to Birmingham, although during my long years as an MP for the other end of that city I was aware of the presence of Oratory and the Church of St Philip Neri and of their Newman connection. I knew that Pope Leo XIII had shown that he was
not Pope Pius IX by making Newman a cardinal, and I thought that was a good thing, rather like Cinderella being taken to the ball, and one in the eye for Cardinal Manning, although whatever else may be said about Manning he was neither ugly nor a sister. I had read
Apologia Pro Vita Sua
as a very young man and had found it surprisingly easy going. But that was about it.

I therefore found myself committed to spend quite a lot of time immersed in Newman, in the Discourses that make up
The Idea of a University
in particular, and in the circumstances in which they were delivered and/or composed. This concentration left a number of impressions, some of them contradictory, upon my mind. First (a blinding truism) that Newman was a man of exceptional interest. There seems to me to be more room for argument about his piety, although I would hesitate to pronounce on that, his charity, his simple niceness, or even his modesty, than about his fascination. This stems partly from his brilliance as a stylist, even though his imagery could be lush and his use of words was rarely economical, as an ironist, and as a polemicist. But it was more than that. He could write dull passages, sometimes it seems almost intentionally so, because he was getting round a corner in his argument with which he did not feel wholly at ease. But whether or not it was intentional he was always conscious that he had written a relatively dull passage. You can almost feel him waiting in slack water, hardly moving his paddle, yet preparing to swoop into the next stage of the argument as soon as a favourable current developed.

He had star quality, as surely as did, amongst his contemporaries, Gladstone or Tennyson or Carlyle. It is possible to confuse Keble with Pusey, or Pusey with Keble and to wonder which was doing what at a particular time. It is never possible to confuse Newman with anyone. It is possible to be irritated or to be muddled by Newman, but very difficult to be bored by him. This is the more striking because I felt throughout that Newman's
mentalité
(my excuse for using the French rather than the English word is that I fondly imagine it to embrace not only the working of his own mind but also the intellectual climate in which he operated) is an ocean away not only from my own but from that
of almost anyone, inside or outside the University, with whom I have frequent contact.

Next week these centenary celebrations culminate with a Newman sermon (from the Archbishop of Canterbury) and service in St Mary's. It will be a notable occasion, but I doubt if any service can recapture the atmosphere in which Newman, having slipped across the cobbled and trafficless High from Oriel, or in later days walked in from Littlemore, and then, in Matthew Arnold's words, ‘after gliding in the dim afternoon light through the aisles [of St Mary's] [and] rising into the pulpit, in the most entrancing of voices breaking the silence with words and thoughts which were a religious music - subtle, sweet, mournful'. Yet we are told from another source that Newman's ‘sermons were read, with hardly any change in the inflexion of the voice and without any gesture on the part of the preacher, whose eyes remained fixed on the text in front of him'. The two descriptions are only superficially incompatible, and whatever was or was not the histrionic quality of Newman's sermons there was a still more remarkable quality about the later ones, and that was their capacity to excite and divide the University. What would the Vice-Chancellor think? Would the Regius Professor of Divinity retaliate? What would the Heads of Houses do? How might the Provost of Oriel navigate between his peers and his turbulent fellow? Would Convocation censure Tract Ninety, which was a Newman sermon in print, or would dedicated Tractarian Proctors, as happened in February 1845, veto the censure being put to the vote? What would be done by poor Bishop Bagot of Oxford, a High Church sympathizer, who liked a quiet life and found himself presiding over the cockpit of whether or not Anglicanism could be Catholicism.