Raking over the ashes
Sam White
Amost everyone involved in the events of May 1968 was at one time or an- other touched with madness. There was de Gaulle himself raging impotently as control of the situation slipped away from him. A cross between Lear and the emperor without any clothes; there was Malraux jib- bering away about a crisis of civilisation; there were ministers who were bracing themselves to tell de Gaulle that he should go; there was Giscard advising that on the contrary de Gaulle should stay on as some kind of totem figure and that it was Pom- pidou who should resign; and finally in the wings there was Mitterrand proclaiming in the best putschist manner that he was ready to form a provisional government, seeming- ly quite oblivious of the fact that there was ,a legal government in office which still en- joyed a parliamentary majority.
Only Pompidou, in an atmosphere of Panic absurdly reminiscent of 1940, seemed wholly sane as he bore alone the heat and burden of the day. Yet he too, at a critical point, had committed an act which he later regretted. keturning in haste from Afghanistan he ordered the reopening of the Sorbonne which his Minister of Educa- tion had closed because of the rioting, and the release of arrested student rioters. This Provided the students with a heady victory and the workers quickly took the point — a spontaneous wave of strikes began.
Built into this larger psychodrama, as Raymond Aron called it, was another Psychodrama based on de Gaulle's relations with his prime minister. This is the subject of a recently published book by Pompidou himself and consisting largely of notes he took at the time. The book, entitled rather menacingly To Establish a Truth, was authorised for publication by his widow and is in a sense as much an act of vengeance on her part as it is of Posthumous vengeance on his. It deals with two events which poisoned Pompidou's relations with de Gaulle: the general's disappearing act at the height of the May troubles and the attempt to involve Mme Pompidou in the so-called Marcovic affair. be Gaulle, who tired of prime ministers as lesser men tire of mistresses, had long been at loggerheads with Pompidou over an issue which he called 'participation'. He was suitably vague about what it actually meant but to him it represented the half-way house between capitalism and socialism — a kind of combination of profit-sharing and a worker share in management. Pompidou, a Pragmatist who was then presiding over a Period of unprecedented prosperity, scoff- ed at the whole idea, pointing out that neither unions nor employers would have anything to ,do with it.
It was then that de Gaulle decided to replace Pompidou with the more pliant Couve de Murville. Unfortunately there were two obstacles to that: the first one was that the government had a majority of only one in the National Assembly and the se- cond was that Couve, try as he would, could not win a parliamentary seat. Then came the May events and it was easy for de Gaulle to conclude that they were the result of his warnings about the need for social reform not being heeded. The decision to replace Pompidou with Couve after the Gaullist triumph at the 1968 elections was therefore not a sudden one but one which had been maturing long before the student troubles.
The other matter of contention, however, sprang directly from them: de Gaulle wanted to resolve the crisis by holding a referendum while Pompidou insisted on general elections. In the end Pompidou won both the argument and the elections, only to be sacked almost immediately after. As though this were not hard enough to fdrgive, there was the wholly unforgivable affair of de Gaulle's disappearance which preceded it. He left the Elysee Palace on 29 May after taking the most minute precau- tions to indicate that he was leaving for good. His stated destination was his coun- - try home at Colombey-Les-Deux-Eglises but instead he turned up four hours later at General Massu's headquarters at Baden- Baden.
There the great actor put on his greatest act. Everything he announced was foutou, while Massu administered first aid in the form of a pep talk and Mme Massu busied herself preparing beds for visitors who had only given a few minutes' notice of their ar- rival.
• Pompidou believes that de Gaulle had decided to quit when he left Paris that morning and that it was Massu who per- suaded him to return. So too, understan- dably enough, does Massu. There is one piece of evidence, however, provided by Pompidou himself which suggests that he never really intended to resign and that the whole performance was a consummate piece of play-acting intended to test reac- tions to his departure. Shortly after de Gaulle left Paris Pompidou told the head of the television news department, Edouard
`Quick, let me in, I'm a scoundrel.'
Sablier, that he would like to go on the air that evening to address the nation. Sablier, whose first loyalty was to the Elysee, passed this request on to de Gaulle's secretary- general, Bernard Tricot, who promptly banned the intended broadcast.
This strongly suggests that de Gaulle an- ticipated such a move on Pompidou's part and had instructed Tricot to block it. It would be interesting- to know what Pom- pidou intended to say in his broadcast but of this there is not a clue in his book. Two other points, however, are satisfactorily cleared up. It is now clear that, contrary to general belief at the time, de Gaulle did not discuss or even mention the possibility of army support if he should decide to return, nor the supposed price of that support an amnesty for former OAS officers like General Satan.
We now come to the second high point of the book, the Marcovic affair. There is no doubt that a deliberate attempt was made to involve the Pompidous, and especially Madame Pompidou, in this affair by claims that she had attended orgies organised by Alain.Delon's former bodyguard who was later murdered. Fake photographs were cir- culated to back up this claim and a Jugoslav pimp in prison on a charge that had nothing to do with the affair offered evidence that he had seen the Pompidous on such occa- sions. Pompidou was the last to learn of these rumours as he was the last to learn that the Pompidou name figured in the Marcovic dossier. The Minister of Justice at the time, Rene Capitan, was an old enemy of Pompidou and clearly relished the possibilities that the case opened up for destroying him. De Gaulle too, with his deep cynicism, possibly thought that there might be something in it, but he did give in- structions that Pompidou should be in- formed. The task was given to Couve de Murville, who funked it.
Finally someone did summon up the courage to tell Pompidou but by that time every dinner table in Paris had been buzzing with the story for three weeks. De Gaulle tried to make amends by inviting the Pom- pidous to a dismal little dinner at the Elysee when the non-existent scandal was at its height, but the damage had been done and Pompidou remained unbending and un- forgiving for the rest of his life. There is no need to dwell on de Gaulle's behaviour in both cases: it was quite simply disgraceful. One other extraneous point might be men- tioned here, for it demolishes another legend. In interviews which Madame Pom- pidou has given in connection with the publication of the book she makes it clear that her husband did not die of cancer of the marrow as has been generally assumed, nor did he die in agonies of pain as has so often and vividly been described. He had, she says, developed a rare blood disease named after its discoverer Waldenstrom, which was kept under control by heavy doses of cortisone. This treatment could have prolonged his life by several years had it not been for a heavy attack of sep- ticaemia brought on by piles.
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