Günter Bischof - The Prague Spring and the Warsaw Pact Invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968

Translated from German into English by Otmar Binder, Vienna.

1. On 22 January 1963, Federal Chancellor Konrad Adenauer and President Charles de Gaulle signed a treaty on Franco-German cooperation at the Elysée Palace.

2. AN, 5AG3/858, historical introduction to the notes of the director of the European Department, Jacques Andréani, 2 February 1979.

3. Georges-Henri Soutou, “De Gaulle’s France and the Soviet Union from Conflict to Détente,” in Europe, Cold War, and Coexistence, 1953–1965 , ed. Wilfried Loth (London: Frank Cass, 2003), 173–89.

4. Georges-Henri Soutou, L’Alliance incertaine: Les rapports politico-stratégiques franco-allemands 1954–1996 (Paris: Fayard, 1996), 281–82; Georges-Henri Soutou, “La France et la défense européenne du traité de l’Elysée au retrait de l’OTAN 1963–1966,” in Crises and Compromises: The European Project, 1963–1969 , ed. Wilfried Loth (Brussels: Bruylant, 2001).

5. MAE, Secrétariat général , vol. 34.

6. Private holdings, minutes of the meeting of de Gaulle and Brezhnev in June 1966.

7. CERFA was founded on the basis of an intergovernmental agreement in 1954 as a platform for political-scientific exchange between Paris and Bonn.

8. For the genesis of this article, see Walter Schütze, “Vingt deux ans après: Un concept français pour un règlement panallemand dans le cadre européen,” Politique étrangère 3 (1989).

9. Maurice Vaïsse, “De Gaulle et Willy Brandt: Deux non-conformistes au pouvoir,” in Willy Brandt und Frankreich , ed. Horst Möller and Maurice Vaïsse (Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 2005).

10. MAE, Secrétariat général, vol. 34. Minutes of the meeting with Brezhnev in June 1966 and of the meeting between the head of the Political Department, Beaumarchais, with his Soviet counterpart, Oberenko, on plans concerning a European security conference with the United States, 15 May 1968.

11. Pierre Maillard, De Gaulle et l’Allemagne (Paris: Plon, 1990), 241, 247–52.

12. MAE, Europe 1960–1970, Tchécoslovaquie, vol. 243, report of 16 October 1968.

13. MAE, Tchécoslovaquie, vol. 243.

14. Private holdings, letter written by Morisset to Jean-Marie Soutou (then inspector general of embassies), 20 September 1968.

15. Olivier Wormser, “L’occupation de la Tchécoslovaquie vue de Moscou,” Revue des Deux Mondes (June/July 1978): 590–605, 30–45; Henri Froment-Meurice, Vu du Quai: Mémoires, 1945–1983 (Paris: Fayard, 1998).

16. MAE, Tchécoslovaquie, vol. 245.

17. MAE, Tchécoslovaquie, vol. 245, telegram of 23 August 1968.

18. MAE, Tchécoslovaquie, vol. 245, telegram of 23 August 1968.

19. MAE, Tchécoslovaquie, vol. 245, report from Moscow, 23 August 1968; MAE, Tchécoslovaquie, vol. 245, report from Warsaw, 25 August 1968.

20. Raymond Aron, “D’un coup de Praguee à l’autre,” Le Figaro 2 October 1968, reprinted in Raymond Aron, Les articles de politique internationale dans Le Figaro de 1947 à 1977 , vol. 3, Les Crises février 1965 à avril 1977: Présentation et notes par Georges-Henri Soutou (Paris: Éditions de Fallois,1997), 561–64.

21. MAE, Tchécoslovaquie, vol. 244.

22. Soutou, “De Gaulle’s France.”

23. De Gaulle mentioned this in a meeting with Federal Chancellor Kiesinger. Debré shared his opinion; Prime Minister Maurice Couve de Murville did not.

24. MAE, Tchécoslovaquie, vol. 315.

25. See the statements de Gaulle made at a press conference on 9 September 1968; Charles de Gaulle, Discours et Messages 5, 1966–1969 (Paris: Plon, 1970), 332–33; for details, see the article by Günther Bischof, “‘No Action’: The Johnson Administration’s Response to the Czech Crisis of 1968,” in this volume.

26. Michel Debré, Gouverner autrement: Mémoires 1962–1970 (Paris: Albin Michel, 1993), 259.

27. MAE, Tchécoslovaquie, vol. 242.

28. MAE, Secrétariat général, vol. 35.

29. Wormser, “L’occupation de la Tchécoslovaquie vue de Moscou,” 45.

30. See his letter to President Johnson, 3 January 1969, in Charles de Gaulle, Lettres, Notes et Carnets, Juillet 1966–Avril 1969 (Paris: Plon, 1987), 273.

31. MAE, Secrétariat général, vol. 35, de Gaulle’s conversations with Senator Scranton, 20 September 1968, and with U.S. ambassador Robert Sargent Shriver Jr., the brother-in-law of the assassinated John F. Kennedy, 23 September 1968.

32. Georges-Henri Soutou, “La menace stratégique sur la France à l’ère nucléaire: Les instructions personnelles et secrètes de 1967 et 1974,” Revue Historique des Armées 236 (2004); de Gaulle’s speech at the Institut des Hautes Etudes de Défense nationale, 25 January 1969 in De Gaulle, Lettres, Notes et Carnets , 284.

33. This is also the gist of Debré’s no-compromise speech before the UN General Assembly on 7 October 1968. MAE, Tchécoslovaquie, vol. 245.

34. The MLF was a proposal floated by the United States dating back to 1963, which provided for a fleet consisting of U.S. submarines and twenty-five NATO country warships equipped with multiple nuclear-armed Polaris ballistic missiles (with a range of 4,500 km). The rockets and warheads were to form the joint property of the NATO countries involved. The fleet would have operated under NATO command. This was supposed to give the nonnuclear members of the alliance, which included Germany, access to and control of a nuclear strike capability. After lengthy discussions within NATO, the proposal was abandoned because no countries except the FRG and the United States were prepared to make substantial contributions to its finances.

35. MAE, Secrétariat général, vol. 35, meeting between Debré and Rusk, 4 October 1968.

36. MAE, Secrétariat général, vol. 34.

37. Debré, Mémoires , 257–58.

38. MAE, Secrétariat général, vol. 34.

39. MAE, Secrétariat général, vol. 245.

40. MAE, Secrétariat général, vol. 244.

41. MAE, Secrétariat général, vol. 35.

42. MAE, Secrétariat général, vol. 35.

43. MAE, Secrétariat général, vol. 35.

44. Debré, Mémoires , 261.

45. At the Quai d’Orsay, Robert Morisset appears, in his letter to Jean-Marie Soutou quoted above, to have been the only one who believed that such a development was possible.

Most Western European Communists loved Marilyn Monroe. They especially loved her dead, for they valued all her tragic contradictions. Her life, the leading Italian Communist review Rinascita commented after her death, “was enlightened by her efforts to be accepted for what she was, and not as a product of a consumerist society.” The actress represented the fundamental contradiction of a “society that knows how to unleash the vitality of its components only to engage them in a violent struggle which leads to its own destruction.” Monroe epitomized the isolation and sense of alienation that Paul Goodman detected in a society in which “human nature could not fully develop or even exist.” For the French Communist critics, Marilyn the icon was also the iconoclast. There was a beautiful inconsistency in her sexual rebellion against a puritanical and conformist society because it made eroticism familiar and spontaneous for every conformist as well. But her “spontaneous defiance” finally “devoured her.” Such comments did not go without resistance within the French and Italian Communist parties ( Parti communiste français or PCF and Partito Comunista Italiano or PCI, respectively), and there was an intense polemic between new and old intellectuals, new and old guard within each party, with the older generation being accused of “intellectual snobbery” toward the cultural ferment in the United States. 1