De Gaulle's France
Richard West
Rouen The feelings of many Frenchmen were well expressed in an editorial of the Rouen Liberte Dimanche: 'Fallen again in- to poverty, France will once more find herself an object of ridicule as she was in the days when she was known as "the sick man of Europe" ... If you are 20 years old or even a bit over 30, that phrase means lit- tle to you. All right. It refers to the time before 1958. It was before the return to power of Charles de Gaulle. It was under the Fourth Republic, an epoch when money lost its value and governments never surviv- ed a vote of confidence .. . Everywhere in the world, people laughed down their noses at the "little French", without head or tail, without power, and without a valid currency.'
Strong words. But they tell the truth
about France before May 1958. In that time, even the English could afford to laugh down their noses at a country that seemed to be bent on its own destruction. That spr- ing I chucked up my job with the Man- chester Guardian and got on a boat to France, only to find at Calais that all the trains were on strike. In those days, it was in France, not England, that everyone ex- pected the trains to be on strike or, if work- ing, late, dirty and expensive.
Paris, when I arrived there, was angry
enough to make one fear for a civil war. The right wing, in their cars, sounded the five-note theme on their horns of Al-ger-ie Fran-caise; for the right wing believed, mistakenly, that de Gaulle would preserve their empire. The left wing assembled for a gigantic march, starting somewhere neat the Bastille, and headed, if I remember rightly, by Pierre Mendes-France and Gerard Philippe, a politician and a film star of great good looks. The hacks reporting the rally included a friend of mine who had gained a black eye fighting another friend of mine over a girl whom both of them wanted to marry — and one of them did.
On the final day of the Fourth Republic,
when the Assembly met to decide on its own dissolution, I happened to visit a café with cabaret across the road from my dirty hotel in the Latin Quarter. Most of the noise came from a table where three elderly and distinguished-looking men were sitting, with girls on their knees, drinking cham- pagne (what Tennyson called 'the sparkling grape of eastern France') and singing. They were singing 'Colonel Bogey', which was popular in that year from the film The Bridge on the River Kwai, and, moreover, they knew the ribald words as sung by the British Army:
Eetlaire 'as only got one ball, Goering 'as two but vairy small, 'Imlair is vairy simlair And poor old Goebbels 'as no balls at all. In the course of their merriment, these gentlemen were approached by the manageress of the cafe who said they were wanted urgently on the telephone from the Chambre des Deputes. They were three leading representatives of the Radical Socialists, or some such party, which need- ed their presence for a historic vote. They would not even go to the telephone but in- stead took another swig and repeated the chorus of 'Colonel Bogey': Bollocks and zee same to you It seemed to me at the time and seems to me now the perfect epitaph for the Fourth Republic.
One of the first and best things done by de Gaulle on returning to power was to ex- pel from France Michael Foot, the English equivalent of a Fourth Republic politician. (Incidentally, has the decree that made him persona non grata yet been rescinded?) Few outsiders, except for Sam White, the Spec- tator's regular Paris correspondent, on whose territory I am now encroaching, foresaw what a good job de Gaulle was to do. He gave France credibility, above all for her currency. The French are inveterate hoarders of gold, and de Gaulle combined with the Soviet Union and South Africa against the United States to float the price of the metal to a realistic value. The paper franc became, with the Deutschemark, the hardest currency on the continent. France attracted foreign investment and with it the new technology.
It is true that France acquired some of The Joneses got a fallout shelter, so . . the ugly features of capitalism. The article in Liberte Dimanche which I quoted before says that in 1958: 'We had only 35 kilometres of motorway between the junc- tion at Poissy and the Saint-Cloud tunnel
Regional television did not exist.' France has its share of other horrors like of- fice and dwelling tower-blocks, super- markets and junk foods, but de Gaulle's regime brought nothing like the calamity of the Tory regimes in England: the demoli- tion of city centres, the transfer of miserable slum populations to new towns and housing estates, the abolition of an- cient systems of local government, and the running down of the railways.
The city centres in France are now the most prosperous, not the most desolate quarters. As a result, Paris, which was once a Red city at war with the rest of France, is now almost entirely conservative; even the working-class suburbs went Gaullist at the recent municipal election. Although de Gaulle encouraged immigration, the blacks and the Arabs are much better assimilated than blacks and Asians in Britain. A city like Rouen, though badly bombed and shelled in the second world war, is recognisably like it was when Joan of Arc burned to death, or Madame Bovary got a bit on the side. (A' poster I saw once for a Hollywood version of Flaubert's novel claimed: 'Whatever it is French women have, Madame Bovary had more of it.')
De Gaulle was of course an intense French patriot. He respected education and the French language, which he both spoke and wrote very well (so does Francois Mit- terrand, who has many Gaullist qualities.) De Gaulle was also a pious Catholic. Seeing the big congregation at St Maclou in Rouen, one has to remember that France is still a Christian country. • Perhaps de Gaulle's greatest achievement was ending the empire that some believed he would keep at all costs. As Liberte Dimanche so rightly says: 'Many French people today seem to imagine that decolonisation was brought about by some kind of mysterious spirit. Eh bien! Thtlr spirit was General de Gaulle.' He had made mistakes before: he re-established French colonial rule in Indochina, North Africa and black Africa, where there were ghastly confrontations — especially in Madagascar. But de Gaulle learnt from mistakes and was ready to change his mind. Moreover his decolonisation was far more wise than Mac- millan's bending before 'the wind of change'. De Gaulle understood that while ancient civilisations like Vietnam and Morocco were capable of self-government, the pseudo-states of black Africa needed advice and help. French neo-colonial rule may anger Marxists but it has brought pro- sperity to countries such as Senegal and the Ivory Coast, while Britain has helped to ruin Ghana, Uganda and Zimbabwe.
However, the good things done by de Gaulle were put at risk by the strange 'events' of May 1968, which I hope to discuss in a final article.
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