How de Gaulle defeated the Vichyite tendency in the United States

FRANK JOHNSON

Last week was the week when plenty of Britons, though not their government, seemed to place themselves on guard against M. Giscard's constitution. It was appropriate, then, that it was also the 60th anniversary of one of the greatest among the many crises in the career of the first Eurosceptic.

Sixty years ago last week he began the process by which he saw off an American attempt to destroy him. Had the attempt succeeded, the history of postwar France would have been different. There would, among other things, have been a civil war between Gaullists and other resistants on the one hand, and the old Vichyites, with whom the Americans preferred to deal, on the other. The history of postwar Europe would have been different, too. We do not yet know how federalist the European Union will become. We do know, however, that without de Gaulle it would be more federalist than it is already. and would have been more federalist much earlier.

Except on British membership, he was also the first Euro-enlarger; enlargement being a process which Eurosceptics support because it means a Union too big for federalism to be imposed on it. The most recent de Gaulle biography in France — by Eric Roussel (Gallimard, 2002) — has a previously unpublished note of his telling a friendly deputy in 1954 that there should be 'a free confederation of Europe. not the Europe of the phoneys [des furnistes]. not the Europe of Jean Monnet, but a Europe which will have Poland and one day Russia.'

Last week's anniversary went unmarked, including in France. Had it been the anniversary of an attempt to destroy a nascent federalist, it might have been widely noted.

On 30 May 1943. de Gaulle flew from London to Algiers and on to the soil of the first significant French territory that the Allies had captured. At American insistence, de Gaulle's Free French had been excluded from the operation. Washington had no intention of allowing him to become the French leader in Algeria.

When France fell in 1940, the United States — not yet in the war — recognised Vichy. The Churchill government recognised de Gaulle in London. Roosevelt wrote to his Vichy ambassador, Leahy, that Petain 'occupies a unique position in the hearts of the French people', and that he wanted Leahy to cultivate the closest possible relations with him. American recognition persisted after Vichy's anti-Semitic decrees, and even after Pearl Harbor and Hitler's declaration of war on the United States. Partly this was out of America's vain hope that Petain might eventually bring France over to the allies, but partly out of the American administration's disapproval of de Gaulle.

Originally, the American candidate for governor-general of Algeria was Marcel Peyrouton, who had found his way to Algiers under Vichy, having signed de Gaulle's death warrant in 1940. Eventually, a more martial figure was needed. So, as Algeria fell to the Allies, the United States produced General Guiraud. He had just escaped from a German prison.

But on his way he had stopped off at Vichy to pledge allegiance to Main. The Gaullists immediately made the most of that. There followed the episode's one incident which is still widely remembered: Roosevelt persuading a reluctant de Gaulle to be photographed with Guiraud in Algiers. The two generals exercised a kind of dual authority over French forces in Algeria. but with the Americans continuing to lean towards Guiraud.

Whereupon another candidate arrived from France who was acceptable to Washington: Admiral Darlan, a former Petainist minister. His arrival indicated who he thought was going to win the war. Washington made known its willingness to work with him too. But Darlan was an antiGaullist too far. The American press rose against the arrangement, led by its grandest voice, Walter Lippmann, a de Gaulle admirer from the start.

Then Darlan was shot dead in his Algiers office by a French youth whose secret trial and execution Guiraud organised within 48 hours. Suspicion fell on the Gaullists. But why should Guiraud have dispatched the assassin so quickly instead of ordering a public trial that would have embarrassed de Gaulle? Obscure royalists have also been sus pected, something with which the most recent scholarship agrees.

Even Churchill, de Gaulle's original champion in 1940, had turned against him in the interests of his more important relationship with Roosevelt. Now de Gaulle began to display that political genius which was to enable him to manipulate a later crisis in Algiers and return to power in 1958. He began to broaden his support, and be prepared to work with anyone who would back him; confident that he could rid himself of the troublesome ones later. These included the communists within the resistance in occupied France. Resistance delegates began to arrive in Algiers to overawe Guiraud's supporters with the breadth of de Gaulle's following. Gradually support fell away from Guiraud, and he passed from history. De Gaulle went on to the 1944 Paris liberation. That, and 1940, gave him the prestige to be called back to create a new France in 1958.

I and some British friends marked last week's forgotten anniversary by having dinner in a restaurant in Colombey-les-deuxEglises, on the safe assumption that no one else would. The taxi-driver from the station at Troyes, some 40 miles away, was not sure whether he had heard of the village. Mention of de Gaulle was no particular help. The driver was about 40. Recourse to the map while steering, and crackly radio contact with taxi headquarters, located the place.

The Colombey taxi-driver, taking us back, said visitors were dwindling. De Gaulle meant nothing to the young such as his daughter. Colombey lies in the flat northeast. De Gaulle's semi-official biographer, Jean Lacouture, says that he dismissed the south as soft.

After dinner the chef came out and took a bow; chefs considering themselves celebrities even in this austere region, it seemed. He had met de Gaulle, he said. They all say that here, we thought. He had met him when the Tour de France came through the village in 1960. A picture in a book I had with me — De Gaulle a Colombey — showed the by then president shaking hands with the cyclist in the lead. The chef pointed to one of the children in the crowd as himself.

He had also helped bear the coffin at the funeral in the church down the street from the restaurant. Sure enough, the book showed the coffin borne by children, this being thought a symbol of de Gaulle as France's future as well as her past. Some of us hope that he is Europe's.