In good King Charles's golden days

TABLE TALK

DENIS BROGAN By some accident which I cannot now account for, on 18 June 1940 it was suggested to me that I should phone a French officer whose name suggested nothing at all. He might, I was told, have something to say that would interest me. As far as I remember, I got straight through, without delay, to this unknown officer, with what immediate result I cannot now remember. It might have been a mere accident, like being in Chicago the day Dillinger was killed or being in Paris on several `historic days' now of next to no interest; but it turned out to be more than that. Very soon I got to know many people in the General's entourage and became an acquain- tance of his. For a few months, I had a fairly important job connected with French affairs (I was fired from it—fired, as I insisted : I did not resign), but I kept in close touch with the Gaul- list organisation (and on several visits to. America did my best to get sense into the State Department, notably failing even with a very intelligent, hostile, important officer of the department, a great friend of mine, who dis- liked the General more and more as I pleaded his case with her).

I also discovered, buried among a collection I had made of recent French tracts for a long book that I had been busily writing (published, by an odd coincidence, on 18 June), that I had bought and read and had possibly been affected by two of Colonel de Gaulle's books—which until then I had totally forgottep reading. I then remembered drinking with some politicians and journalists in the Café Royal. One of them was Vernon Bartlett, then an independent htly. He had come back (in March 1940 I think) from an MPS' excursion to the Maginot Line and he had told me of meeting a very remarkable tank officer. He and one or two others of the delega- tion had refused to visit empty Strasbourg.

In the line they met this tall tank officer who greeted them in these chilling words : 'Gentle- men, you are visiting an army that is going to be beaten.' He then said, 'However, show you what my regiment can do.' He shouted orders to a group of tanks and found that the intercom wasn't working.

Of what de Gaulle actually did in the cam- paign of 1940 and to what extent he was a radi- cal innovator, I am not competent to speak. I am more than willing to accept the judgment, not debunking but rather chilling, of Colonel- Professor Chapman. But I very early formed an opinion, that I have not changed, that de Gaulle, if not a great general. was a most adroit Politician. At the end, touching wood, he has overplayed his hand, but he had for years played %ell' bad hands with brilliant skill. It was one of the mistakes of the old politicians of the Fourth (and Third) republics to assume that, as a soldier, de Gaulle was bound to be (a) stupid and (b) 'reactionary.' De Gaulle was not stupid and he was only reactionary in the special sense that he wanted to undo many of the more crippling legacies of the Old Rerrime, of the Empire and of the Jaco-

bins. In so far as he was influenced in his region- alist ideas by Maurras, it was in that direction; and inasmuch as he was trying in his new Senate to create a body of 'notables,' he had among his ancestors Montesquieu and Tocqueville (al-

though Tocqueville, by the time he wrote L'Anc•ien Regime, despaired of any scheme for really weakening the power of Paris).

But if the General in many ways detested the work of Richelieu, he was, like the great Cardinal, a masterly organiser of 'days of dupes.' I saw one or two of the attempted con- spiracies launched in London, notably the at- tempt organised by that old pseudo-Machiavelli, Andre Labarthe • (the stooge was Admiral Muselier). But as Labarthe was one of those melodramatic conspirators who whispered 'hist' in a loud voice, the General, then in Africa, was fully informed and pulled the rug from under him with great skill, to the entertainment of the then Foreign Secretary, now Earl of Avon.

The General's manner could be very freezing. It was a part of his building up of his persona.

He was busy creating the doctrine of his legiti- macy and that involved a total ban on any sug- gestion that the Vichy regime was in any sense legitimate. That very remarkable young man, Etienne Mantoux, who was to be killed in the liberation of Paris, leaving behind him that his-

torical time bomb, The Political Consequences of Mr Keynes, escaped from France with his younger brother and was in- a group reviewed

by the General. He was asked what he had been doing (the General knew, of course, of his father, Paul Mantoux). 'At the Armistice . .

`There was no Armistice.' When the Vichy gov- ernment . . ."There was no Vichy govern- ment.' This meant, in practice, that de Gaulle was unjust to many patriotic Frenchmen, who 'only in a general honest thought' had saved the government of the Marshak although two of his closest collaborators in recent years, MM Pompidou and Couve de Murville, had served Vichy, and M Debre was, if I remember right, a successful double agent inside the Vichy machine. But consciously or unconsciously,

General de Gaulle imitated Louis XVIII in 1814, who rebuked a servile but tactless rallie, who had congratulated the ci-det•ant Comte de Provence 'on becoming King,' with the words :

`And when did I cease to be King?' After all, this was politically profitable. Thus, when the Communists and the more gullible resistance leaders during the liberation of Paris wanted the General to proclaim the Republic at the Hotel de Ville, they were told: 'The Republic has never ceased to exist.'

This republican legitimacy angered a good many doctrinaires of the right. Some had thought that, as the Third Republic had been the result of the military collapse of the Second Empire, and the attempted restoration of 1871-

73 had -led to the less impressive hopes that, when the Comte de Chambord died, the.Comte de Paris would succeed, so the restoration of the semi-legitimate King would now at last come

about, to the profit of the present Comte de Paris. It was such stuff as dreams are made on, but then so are many things in French politics.

But a great many of "the right' never forgave de Gaulle for his revolt against Main, especially the more and more discredited loyalists who still supported the Marshal after he had refused to fly to Africa when the Germans took over the `free zone' in November 1942. History con- demned them and so they never forgave. I can remember meeting a young highbrow publisher who had expressed interest in publishing a French translation of a book of mine. He in- dulged in the usual French right wing scandal

(more malicious and more mendacious than the scandal-mongering of the left). But he overdid it. He suddenly fixed me with what, no doubt, he thought was a glittering eye. 'Did you know that de Gaulle deserted to the Germans in 1940, and then came back, forty-eight hours later, for the Germans had treated him as they treated Lenin in 1917? He was sent back to wreck the French army and to act as a German agent, as he has done. Of course, all the evidence has been hushed up.' 1 looked at the young man and asked him if he expected me to believe him. I had lived in Paris, as I pointed out, before he was born, or at any rate when he was still a little boy. It was insulting to tell me such rubbish. He replied, 'Well, maybe the Germans didn't do it but he has behaved just as he would have if they had done it.'

What de Gaulle stocd for, as a ruler of France, was the Bonapartist tradition; the bas- ing of the controlling authority on the popular will expressed in plebiscites. Only this view of what France needed accounts for his failure to use the assetnblee introuvable that the follies of the left and the arts of M Pompidou had pro- vided for the President in the summer of 1968.

The rash decision to appeal to the people souverain recalled to me an episode when the regime was new and when M Soustelle was, or thought he was, its rather conspicuous eminence grise. That excellent historian and old friend of mine, Adrien Dansette (like so many other people a product of the isE! ) gave a lecture at the Societes Savantes on the preparations for the coup d'etat of 1851. The most interesting and conspicuous members of the audience were Prince Napoleon and his wife. Both are very tall and the Prince very handsome (he is a descen- dant of Louis XIV but not of either of the Napoleons) and the Princess is beautiful. We all (I imitating my betters) bowed and kissed hands etc. Then there was a noise at the door and in walked M Soustelle with his bodyguard of 'gorillas.' (He needed them; a nearly success- ful attempt to kill him occurred a few days later, blasphemously near the BBC office.) The minis- ter did not recognise the protocol of the court of the Princesse Mathilde, but listened with in- terest to the story of the preparations of 'le deux decembre.' I asked Adrien Dansette, later, in what role M Soustelle was casting himself, as Louis-Napoleon. or Morny? 'As Morny.' He soon ceased to be Morny.

Now lesser men will 'creep out again to feel the sun' like that eminent Protestant school- master, M Guy Mollet, whose mere name al- ways makes me think of how much there was to be said for Pierre Laval. Many of the General's would-be successors are in every way superior to M Mollet--even M Tixier-Vignancour. But I have seen M Valdry Giscard d'Estaing wearing an old Etonian lie to which he is not entitled. As Forain put it in a celebrated cartoon, `Que la Republique etait belle .sous ?Empire.' The French people may soon M laying much the same.