OBITUARY
Charles de Gaulle arbiter of France
For Wore than a generation he dominated the destinies of France. In an age of event- ful drama and personal heroism, the for- tunes of Charles de Gaulle were intertwined with those of his country. His career both reflected and moulded the nation's develop- ment. Three times he stood alone as the arbiter of France's future—as the man of 18 June 1940, the man of 13 May 1958, and the crisis President of May 1968. Just as he was the architect of the Free French move- ment and the creator of the Fifth Republic, so in 1968 he snatched France from the brink of civil war. On all occasions he favoured representative republican institu- tions, universal suffrage and free elections. He first gave French women the vote. He first gave communists ministerial office. He was one of the greatest decolonisers of the century. The man whom his enemies denounced for dictatorship persistently rejected its temptations and at the end he surrendered power voluntarily—almost wantonly.
He demanded, of course, a stronger and more independent executive power in the state. So had thoughtful reformers of every political shade during the previous seventy years. What he failed to get in 1946, he ensured in 1958. And in 1958, as in 1940, he rose to power because others abdicated. Since it was not in his character to abdi- cate—and 1946 was by no means, as it turned out, an abdication—the monetary expectation in 1968 that he would quit power was always misguided. He saw him- self as the presidential symbol of continuity, the arbiter above all factions.
But what, besides, has he achieved, for France and for the world, since 1958? Inten- tions apart, what is his legacy? There is a case, even now, for deferred judgment. But a long life should not be judged only in terms of its final phase, and the larger ques- tion, of perennial interest to him, was rather what 'history' will say of his life and achievements as a whole. It is not enough to speak in tempting terms of paradox: the mutineer of 1940 who became the autocratic president, the hero of the left and of the Resistance who led the rightist Rassemble- ment only three years later, the chosen champion of the colons and colonels who proceeded to give Algeria independence, the anti-communist who followed a foreign policy dear to the Kremlin, and so on. The problem is not to list paradoxes, but to explain them. And two persistent features of his life may offer some explanation.
The first was that all his greatest conflicts were with people or institutions with which he had had close personal involvement. He fought against Germany in two world wars. Yet German was the only foreign language he spoke fluently, he spent more than two and a half years in a German prison camp, and his first book (La Discorde chez l'ennemi) was a highly intelligent analysis of the stages in Germany's then recent defeat.
To Britain he showed similar ambivalence. He was the only eminent Frenchman in 1940
(and he was not then very eminent) who kept faith in Britain's power to survive and fight on. He promoted in London, and tefe.
phoned to Reynaud on 16 June 1940, the astonishing proposal for the union of Britain and France into 'one nation' with a common citizenship. Yet twice in the 1960s he was to block Britain's entry into the Common Market on the grounds that she was not yet ready to be European.
Just as some of his greatest latter-day triumphs were scored against his allies— whether Britain and the United States, or Germany and Benelux—so the fiercest feuds of his life were with the French Army, some with his former hero, Marshal Petain.
From this combination of close personal involvement with energetic antagonism came highly charged emotional attitudes and rela- tionships which led, in turn, to one of de Gaulle's gravest weaknesses of character: a lack of magnanimity and generosity, which kept him below the moral stature of Churchill. His treatment of Petain was less than generous, his ccinduct towards Ger- many was whimsical and inconsistent, his behaviour towards Britain was shabby.
Accordingly, along with his immense ability, supreme moral and physical courage, lofty intelligence, historical greatness. went also the flaws of arrogance and disdain, the sin of hubris. To France herself his attitude was an unstable compound of pride in national achievement with contempt for most living Frenchmen, a religious Ryer- ence for the dignity of man which made him as relentlessly anti-Nazi and anti- communist as Churchill, with a lofty dis- dain for all who disagreed with him or who criticised his policies.
His 1940 gesture of total defiance, an act of mutiny and revolt, committed de Gaulle to a political posture that was at once both traditionalist and revolutionary. When no national figure of greater experience or eminence came to supplant him in London, his claim to authority could rest only on a mystical personification of the national will of captive France. He was obliged to be half Joan of Arc, half Leon Gamboa, proclaiming a national war of resistance, clutching the Cross of Lorraine beneath the political hybrid, merging into a single force of passionate self-assertion the traditional tricolour.
Next, in enduring importance, was his ending of the war in Algeria, his radial solution to the twin problems of the colons and the Algerian independence movement.
From all these ordeals emerged the national father-figure who ruled the nation from 1958 until 1969 with a new serenity and confidence. Since France of the Fifth Republic was also France of the Fifth Plan. Gaullism in its heyday enjoyed uncovenan- ted benefits from the creative work of the Fourth Republic which he so constantlY denigrated. Both the demographic upsurge and the economic dynamism dated from the Fourth, and were not always used by the Fifth for constructive ends.
Yet his achievements, even latterly. were far from being only negative. There was positive rapprochement with the whole communist world unhappily interrupted bY the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. There was a specifically French contribution to the wider easing of tensions between East and West. and to European relations with the 'Third World' Above all, he taught the world to think differently about France, and France 0 think differently about herself.
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