Norman Stone - The Atlantic and Its Enemies

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 Félix Gaillard assembled a thin majority to replace a Maurice Bourgès-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 René Rémond 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 Besançon’s Une génération 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-Honoré 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 Besançon 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 Lycée 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. Besançon 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 cafés, 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 Citroën 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 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 Napoléon 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.