Postwar France was dominated by Charles de Gaulle for twenty-five years. Though not always at the helm of
government, he was nevertheless vital to the political life of the country. Immediately after the war,
with the declaration of the Fourth Republic, de Gaulle was elected President. But within months the
internal contradictions of the new constitution forced him to resign. However, in 1958,
destiny beckoned
again when the Algerian War threatened to divide the nation. De Gaulle offered himself as mediator, and in
short order had become President of the Council of Ministers, declared the Fifth Republic and been
elected its first President. He masterminded France's withdrawal from Algeria and rapidly returned the
country to stability.
De Gaulle remained in power, a forceful figure on the European and world stages, taking France out of NATO in 1966
and surviving the upheaval of May 1968. In 1969 he went to the country over the heads of its elected representatives
once too often and lost. His death the following year united the nation in mourning and brought an era to an end.
The State
What was the most important task for the French government? To continue with the war? To ensure the survival
of the French people? To guarantee public order, rebuild institutions, reestablish justice under the law? Where was
one to begin? If it is true that governing is first of all a matter of establishing a hierarchy between various matters
of urgency, no statesman was ever subjected to more various, more competing and more urgent demands than the head of
the French provisional government in August 1944.
Everything that can be learnt about Charles de Gaulle shows that among the innumerable tasks facing him at the time
when he took possession of power in a liberated Paris, he saw his supreme task as quite simply to restore the authority
of the State. He believed that he had been called above all to unite it, to reconstruct it and to give it new impetus,
for everything depended upon this.
One of the constant themes of those who write about the period immediately after the Liberation is the uncertainty as
to whether it was really a "restoration of order" or a "revolution". Some are indignant that General de Gaulle,
reappearing in the chaotic France of August 1944, did not become the Varlin of that Commune, or even the Vergniaud of
that Convention. This is to forget that the war was still going on, the American impact, the Communist challenge, the deep
splits in the national community and of course the temperament and outlook of de Gaulle himself.
In any case, to believe
that the man who, in June 1940, had unleashed not the Resistance (which was the work of many who were unaware of his
initiative) but the questioning of Vichyism, is to ignore not only the history and personality of Charles de Gaulle,
but that of the popular uprisings and their relation to the State in French history: whether white, blue or red, or
blue-white-red, civil or military, secular or religious, the State has never taken long to absorb and control any
movement rising from below. When the balance sheet is drawn up regarding what was done between August 1944 and January 1946, it will be seen that
the "revolutionary" elements did not play an inconsiderable part. Taking the first few months of the new regime, the
period when the revolution supposedly failed, one is tempted to sum up the dilemma between regaining control and
revolution with the formula "regaining control of a revolution". One can hardly deny the revolutionary character of
the movement that swept away the apparatus of power that had been set up four years before at Vichy.
On 25 August, Charles de Gaulle refused to "proclaim the Republic" on the grounds that it had never ceased to exist.
The day before, he had said to Philippe Viannay that France was not a country "that is beginning", but a country "that
is carrying on 1". Was not the State, the object of all his cares, to be defined - unlike regimes, systems, dynasties
and governments - by permanence and continuity?
If France was to "carry on", however, it could not perpetuate the Third Republic, still less Vichy. So the forces of
the Liberation had to make it quite clear that it was the heir of neither; that its legitimacy had other sources than
the inheritance of the old exiled Marshal or the institutional mechanisms that had seized up before the
disaster of 1940.
But it should be noted that although, in March 1942, Christian Pineau had had great difficulty in persuading de Gaulle
not to reject the Third Republic and Vichy in equal measure, in September 1944 de Gaulle made the man who embodied
the republican spirit, Jules Jeanneney, his Minister of State and ignored the Marshal's final offer to make him,
de Gaulle, the heir of Vichy. A week after his forced departure into exile, on 11 August, Philippe Petain had
given Admiral Auphan, his former Naval Minister, a secret mission to contact de Gaulle with a view to finding a
formula for the transfer of power that would make it possible "to reconcile all French people of good faith"
and "to avoid a civil war", on condition that "the principle of legitimacy" that he, Petain, still claimed to
embody was safeguarded. Auphan arrived in Paris on 12 August and, through General Giraud, sent General
de Gaulle a "memorandum on the need for a legitimate transfer of power". This took place the day after the triumph
in the Champs-Elysees. Auphan waited in vain. This is de Gaulle's own comment: "Without in any way doubting the
importance for the moral future of the nation of the fact that in the end Petain has fallen to de Gaulle, I can
only respond to him with my silence."`
Extract from “DE GAULLE The Ruler: 1945-1970”, Written by Jean Lacouture. Hartnolls Limited, Bodmin, Cornwall. Great Britain, 1991.
