Carroll Quigley - Tragedy and Hope - A History of the World in Our Time

The French economic resurgence, which the British so belatedly asked to join, was in no sense a consequence of De Gaulle’s policies, nor were they synchronized, except accidentally, with the advent of De Gaulle and his Fifth French Republic on May 13, 1958. The basis for the French economic boom was laid under the Fourth French Republic, and De Gaulle simply profited from it. It might be said that the economic expansion, and its continuation after 1958, was based on those factors of the French system which the new De Gaulle regime left relatively unchanged—an educational structure accessible to anyone willing to work hard at his studies, the high quality of upper-level technical education, the close alliance between the administrative bureaucracy and the industrial system, and the ease with which highly educated technicians can pass from one to the other; by the readiness of the French mind to accept a rational, over-all view of life and its problems (this contributed considerably to the success of French economic planning), and by the whole concept of individual opportunity and careers open to talent within a structured social arrangement. All these go back to the Napoleonic period of French history and were, thus, well adapted to De Gaulle’s personal inclinations. The fact that they are all quite alien to the English way of life also helps to explain the relative failure of the British economy in the Plan Era.

The Fifth Republic was obviously tailored to De Gaulle’s personal inclinations, but it was also adapted to the bureaucratic substructure that had continued, as a semi-alien basis, to underlie the French political system in the bourgeois era. Worded in another way, we might say that the shift of the Western world over the last three decades from a bourgeois to a technocratic pattern was well adapted to the subterranean bureaucratic basis that had survived in France, more or less unobserved, during the century in which property was obviously triumphant. The bureaucracy Louis XIV and Napoleon had built up had been directed toward totalitarian power and national glory; the age of property (roughly 1836-1936) had sought to establish the influence of wealth unhampered by bureaucracy, and one of its chief aims had been to keep the bureaucratic structure, the centralized French tradition of administration, and the forces of French rationalism outside the sphere of economics and moneymaking. The economic depression of the 1930’s and the defeat of 1940, both directly caused by the selfish interests and the narrow outlook (especially the narrow and selfish financial outlook) of the French bourgeoisie, made it clear that some new system was needed in France, just as the experience of the Resistance made it clear that some new system was needed in Europe. It was, in view of the French rationalist and bureaucratic tradition, almost inevitable that the new domestic system would be a more integrated, more rational, and more bureaucratic one than that of the bourgeois era, although it is not so clear what this new system will establish as its goal. This, indeed, is the problem facing France today, a problem concerned with goals rather than with methods, since there is now a broad consensus (including the bourgeoisie) prepared to accept a rationalized, planned, bureaucratized society dominated by a pervasive fiscalism, a kind of neomercantilism, but there is no consensus on what goals this new organization should seek.

Only a very small group of Frenchmen share De Gaulle’s idea that the new system of France, the Fifth Republic, should make national power and glory its primary aim. A larger, and surprisingly influential, group, best represented by Monnet, wishes to work for the kind of rational humanism or unified diversity that this volume has used as its chief criterion for judging historical change. This group hopes, by the proper organization of men and resources, to increase the production of wealth and to reduce the conflicts of power sufficiently to remove these distracting matters from the center of human concern so that, once prosperity and peace have been relatively secured, men will find the time and energy to turn to their more important ends of personality development, artistic expression, and intellectual exploration. This point of view, based on a significant distinction between what is necessary and what is important, hopes to find the opportunity to turn to important matters once the necessary ones have achieved a level of minimal satisfactions.

The Frenchmen of a third group, which includes the major part of the population, have little concern with the goals of De Gaulle and even less with those of Monnet but are concerned with an almost repulsive pursuit of material affluence, something of which they had long heard but never considered achievable before. Today, for the first time, such affluence seems achievable to the great mass of Frenchmen as it does to the great mass of West Germans, to many English, and to increasing number of Italians. Americans and Swedes, who are already disillusioned with the fruits of affluence, must be indulgent to these recent arrivals in the materialist rat race. The chief political aim of this large group is for political stability free from partisan upheavals, an end that De Gaulle and the Fifth Republic seem more capable of securing than the unstable, multipartied Fourth Republic.

Much of the ambiguity about De Gaulle rests on a failure of historical synchronisms. This can be seen in regard to the three aspects of (a) political ideology, (b) economic management, and (c) the relationship between these two. In the 1920’s, all three of these were antipathetic to De Gaulle’s outlook, since forty years ago the three were: (a) a democratic, nationalist, sovereign, independent state pursuing the goal of national self-interest; (b) a capitalistic economy; and (c) a laissez-faire relationship of no government in business. De Gaulle’s ideas are rather those of Louis XIV, that is: (a) a sovereign, independent, authoritarian state pursuing the goal of national glory; (b) a mixed economy of a corporative sort; and (c) political domination of economic life. The point of view of the “new Europeans” on these matters was: (a) a democratic, cooperative political structure of shared and divided powers on a European basis, seeking peace and stability in an interlocking organizational structure rising through European, Atlantic-Western, and worldwide levels; (b) a mixed economy; and (c) a planned, state-directed drive toward increased affluence. De Gaulle cares only for (a) and has little interest in (b) or (c) so long as they provide him with a rate of economic expansion capable of supporting his ambitions in (a). The mass of French people care little about De Gaulle’s ambitions in (a) so long as they obtain political stability that will allow them to seek the affluence they wish from (c); while the technicians, concerned largely with (b), are prepared to let De Gaulle seek glory in (a) and the people seek affluence in (c) so long as both leave them alone to manage the proper mixture of the economy they desire in (b). Thus France, by this most extraordinary mixture of cross-purposes, is led into the future by a man whose ideas in all three areas are almost completely obsolete.

It is easy for English-speaking persons to condemn De Gaulle. Many of them consider his obsolescent ideas a danger to Europe and to the world. Indeed, they are, but this does not mean that they do not have some basis in De Gaulle’s personal experience and in the recent history of France itself. The general was determined to restore the power and prestige of France as an independent state within a context of national states similar to that in which France had suffered the blows to its prestige in 1910-1945. To him these defeats were almost personal psychic injuries that could be repaired only by new French triumphs in the same nationalistic context and not by successes in an entirely different context such as that of an integrated Europe. Obsessed by the pursuit of the glory of France in the nationalistic era in which his own character had been formed and personally piqued by the rebuffs he had received in his own career, the rejection of his military advice by his superiors in the 1920’s and 1930’s, the defeats of France in the diplomatic and military arenas in the period 1936-1940, the rebuffs administered by the United States Department of State and the White House to his efforts to make himself the leader of the Free French in 1940-1943, and finally the general belittling, as he saw it, to his ideas and dignity during the liberation—all these served to make his outlook more remote, more rigid, and more opinionated until he came to regard himself as the God-given leader for a revived France and came to regard the English-speaking nations as the chief obstacles in his path to this end.