NINETEEN
Well, my dear country, my old country, here we are together, once again, facing a harsh test . . .
—de Gaulle, January 1960
To de Gaulle, from his Grateful Country: Once and for All, MERCI!
—Canard Enchaîné, on the ending of the Algerian War, 1962
IN JANUARY 1959 the following year, shortly after his sixty-ninth birthday, de Gaulle became president; his only, laconic words to his predecessor, “Au revoir, Monsieur Coty,” seemed like a calculated snub to the Fourth Republic and the contempt in which he held it and its participants. The Fifth Republic, and the new Gaullist era, had begun. France’s allies felt encouraged.
With de Gaulle authority moved back from Algiers and its rebellious factions to Paris. So too did the direction of the war, which at the same time hit the world stage as a dominant issue. There it would remain, long after the war itself ended, as a paradigm for anti-colonialists and revolutionaries from Cuba to Palestine, to the African National Congress in South Africa, and as a textbook to western staff colleges studying the lessons of terrorism.
Promptly in June 1958, de Gaulle flew to Algeria where he stunned the pieds noirs with his “I have understood you” speech—though it soon became apparent that he had understood them not in quite the way they had hoped. Whereas, to the French Army and thepieds noirs, Algeria was everything, to de Gaulle it was only one factor in his overall ambition: the resurrection of the greater glory of France—and it was on no account to get in the way of that. In September 1959, de Gaulle offered the Algerians the fateful words of “self-determination,” a compromise that fell short of the hopes of all sides. Soon disillusion was renewed as it became apparent that even Charles de Gaulle had no simple formula for ending the war. With uncharacteristic indecision, de Gaulle let eighteen months run through his hands, and his attempts to achieve a ceasefire with the FLN were rejected with a crushing snub. Meanwhile the ultras among the pieds noirs of Algiers were becoming steadily more violent in their opposition, now, to de Gaulle.
On 24 January 1960, there was a fresh eruption in Algiers. Well-armed ultras started building barricades; gendarmes were brought in to clear them and firing broke out, killing twenty-four and wounding two hundred among the unfortunate gendarmes caught in a deadly crossfire. For France it was the ugliest moment in the five-year-old war to date; Frenchmen were killing Frenchmen for the first time. What was almost worse, some of the elite para units showed signs of fraternising with the pieds noirs behind the barricades. Like Thiers during the Commune of 1871, de Gaulle now realised how brittle an instrument the army was. As “Barricades Week” dragged on, there was a sense in France that, once again, revolution and civil war were a very real possibility. Then on the evening of the 29th, the weather took a friendly hand; in Algiers the skies opened on the overheated citizenry. That same night de Gaulle appeared on national television, dressed—with deliberate effect—in his uniform with two stars, familiar to so many in the army who could recall 1940 and the historic promenade through Paris in August 1944. It was as a soldier as well as head of state that he ordered the army in Algeria to obey him, and not to side with the insurrection: “Finally, I speak to France. Well, my dear country, my old country, here we are together, once again, facing a harsh test.”1 Though saying nothing new, it was one of his finest speeches, a performance of hypnotic wizardry. De Gaulle’s appeal won; under an icy rain in Algiers the would-be insurgents broke up and went off home.
1960 was, nevertheless, to be a year of little comfort to de Gaulle, bringing less support and fresh enemies, as it brought the FLN new allies, both in the outside world and within France herself. More and more articles were appearing in the national press by young national servicemen returning from Algeria shocked by the “immoral acts” in which they had been forced to participate, had seen, or heard about. Out of all this inflammation of liberal sentiment there emerged in September a powerful “Manifesto of the 121,” which incited French conscripts to desert. The 121 signatories were all celebrities, including Sartre, de Beauvoir, Françoise Sagan and Simone Signoret. At the same time the “Jean-son Network” physically aided the underground work of the FLN in France, running funds for it and helping FLN terrorists in hiding.
OVER EASTER 1961, there were plastic bombs in Paris killing six and wounding fifty; a bomb in the men’s room of the Bourse injured thirty. Then, in April, came the gravest challenge to de Gaulle that the Algerian War was to bring. In Algiers four disaffected senior generals raised the standard of revolt in the name of Algérie Française—headed by a much respected airman, General Maurice Challe,79 and the highly political and wily principal in the 1958 coup, known as “the Mandarin”—General Raoul Salan. Challe had come closer than any other commander-in-chief to winning the war on the ground; but in doing so he felt that he had—in the name of de Gaulle—traduced undertakings to the loyal Muslim levies, called Harkis, that France would never abandon them. A man of highest principles, he considered honour left him no alternative but revolt.
On the night of 21 April, de Gaulle and his new Minister for Algerian Affairs, Louis Joxe, attended a performance in Paris of Britannicus, Racine’s play about treason at court during the early rule of Nero—a favourite of de Gaulle’s and from which he could quote whole verses. Later that night Joxe heard the first news of the putsch and—breaching a strict standing order—telephoned the Élysée to rouse de Gaulle. With immediate sangfroid, as usual, de Gaulle simply enquired:
“What are you going to do, then, Joxe?”
“I suppose go to Algeria, somehow.”
“Bien . . .” 2
Joxe flew off courageously into the unknown, in an attempt to win over wavering commanders in the field.
At the first meeting of cabinet ministers the next day, de Gaulle talked contemptuously about the possibility of a coup by “this army which, politically, always deludes itself.” To his chef de cabinet he remarked with a gesture of weary cynicism, If they want to land in France, they will land. That’s up to them. There won’t be much to stop them. What will happen? Oh, it’s not difficult to guess: these are men of narrow vision; they will very soon be faced with problems that will be beyond them.
De Gaulle’s premier, Michel Debré, issued somewhat hysterical instructions for “citizens” to go to any airfields where paras might be dropping, and “convince the misled soldiers of their grave error.” Possibly the true hero of that day of utter stupefaction in Paris was Roger Frey, de Gaulle’s Minister of the Interior. Acting with speed and vigour, he swooped to arrest a general and several other conspirators in flagrante, thereby nipping in the bud a serious attempt to march on the capital. To this end some 1800 lightly equipped paras actually had been waiting in the Forest of Orléans, and another 400 in the Forest of Rambouillet. Joining up with tank units from Rambouillet, they were to move in three columns on Paris, seizing the Élysée and other key points of the administration. But the venture had a strongly amateurish note about it, with some of the waiting putschists apparently unaware even of the codeword “Arnat” (a simple elision of Armée and Nationale). Once they were rendered leaderless by their general’s arrest, no orders came through until a detachment of gendarmes appeared in the forest and gave a brusque order to disperse, with which the powerful body of paras sheepishly complied.
On Sunday, 23 April, Paris presented an extraordinary spectacle under the warming spring sunshine. I was awaiting a permit to go to Algeria, which was promptly frozen in consequence of the putsch; instead I watched elderly Sherman tanks of Second World War vintage rumble out from retirement and take up positions outside the Assembly and other government buildings. Some broke down and had to be towed across the Concorde. Compared with the modernity of equipment in Algeria, it was painfully plain that—as de Gaulle had remarked—there was not “much to stop them” should Challe’s paras make a determined bid to land in France. All air movement round the city was halted; buses and trains stopped running, and even the cinemas closed down. Only the cafés remained open for business, and they were crammed with Parisians discussing the latest turn in the crisis.
Then, at eight o’clock that night, all France clustered round the television as de Gaulle again addressed the shaken, anxious nation in his brigadier’s uniform. Dark circles round his eyes visibly filled with pain as he spoke of his beloved army in revolt. Scathingly he dismissed the rebel leaders as a “ ‘little clutch’ of generals in retirement.” But here was “the nation defied, our strength shaken, our international prestige debased, our position and our role in Africa compromised. And by whom? Hélas! Hélas! Hélas! By men whose duty, honour and raison d’être it was to serve and to obey.” Striking the table with his fist to reinforce his words, he enjoined: “In the name of France, I order that all means, I repeat all means, be employed to block the road everywhere to those men . . . I forbid every Frenchman, and above all every soldier, to execute any of their orders.” No excuses or extenuating circumstances whatever for disobeying this order would be accepted. Finally, he ended with one of his most impassioned, personal appeals: “ Françaises, Français! Look where France risks going, in contrast to what she was about to become. Françaises, Français! Aidez-moi!” Janet Flanner was one who rated the speech de Gaulle’s “greatest speaking performance of his career”: “When he cried three times ‘Hélas! Hélas! Hélas!’ it was the male voice of French tragedy, more moving, because anguished by reality, than any stage voice in Britannicus.”
In what became known as the “Battle of the Transistors,” an important essay in the power to influence via modern communications, all across Algeria French conscripts listened to de Gaulle’s speech—and heeded him. The vast majority refused to go along with their rebellious colonels and generals, and the 1961 putsch was over. The elite Foreign Legion paras, the power behind the revolt, dynamited their barracks in Zeralda and marched out defiantly singing Piaf’s “Je ne regrette rien.” Challe surrendered to French justice. He received a maximum sentence of fifteen years’ imprisonment, and loss of his rank, decorations and pensions—ruined by a reluctant commitment to “save the honour of the army.” Salan disappeared into hiding in Algiers, to emerge as titular head of the Organisation Armée Secrète (OAS) which would spread indiscriminate and senseless terror across Algeria, and soon import it to Paris. But the divisions and weaknesses that the Challe revolt had displayed within the French Army meant that any prospect of AlgérieFrançaise was now dead. De Gaulle was forced to negotiate with the FLN rebels—and not on his terms, even though France, the very same week as the putsch, had shown her muscle by exploding a first atomic bomb at Reganne deep in the Algerian Sahara. In May 1961, the first talks took place at Evian on Lake Geneva; by July they had failed, with the FLN holding out for total capitulation by de Gaulle.
DURING THE COURSE of the Algerian War, over thirty separate attempts were made on de Gaulle’s life. On 8 September 1961, a disaffected young colonel, a would-be Stauffenberg, Jean-Marie Bastien-Thiry, executed the most spectacular to date, exploding a huge mine of explosive and napalm at Pont-sur-Seine as de Gaulle’s Citroën passed on his way home to Colombey-les-Deux-Églises. Supplied from old Resistance stock, the explosive had deteriorated and evidently failed to detonate properly; de Gaulle’s chauffeur, handling the slewing car with exceptional skill, drove through the sheet of flame, somehow managing to keep on the road. Over the six months, culminating in February 1962, that the main OAS offensive in France lasted, it would only tilt French sympathies towards de Gaulle’s acceptance of a precipitate withdrawal from Algeria.
Even without the OAS, an atmosphere of violence between the police and the domestic Algerian community had been progressively alienating liberal opinion. In this brutal little sideshow, no fewer than sixteen police were killed and forty-five wounded, most of them during the months of August and September 1961. Inevitably, the police reacted with parallel brutality; in mid-October, some 25,000 Algerian workers from the poor suburbs (undoubtedly activated by the FLN) launched an unarmed demonstration against the harsh curfew and repressive measures imposed on them by the government. It was broken up by the police with a disproportionate violence that was shocking to French public opinion. There were rumours that “dozens of Algerians were thrown into the Seine and others were found hanged in the woods.” As the truth began to come out over three decades later, during the trial of arch-wartime collaborator Maurice Papon, the true figures appear to have numbered close to 200 fatalities. At the same time the deadly device of torture used by the French Army in Algeria, the gégène (a dynamo used to administer shocks to sensitive parts of the body) made its ugly appearance on the Parisian scene, and by January 1962 France-Soir was lamenting that there was “something wrong with justice” when indicted torturers repeatedly escaped sentence.
Compared with the indiscriminate, murderous mayhem that would be imposed on London by the IRA, the bombings that hit Paris would never approximate. As heartless killers, the OAS were rank amateurs. Walls were covered with graffiti by night; fairly ineffectual bombs were placed to damage property, while avoiding any possible injury to life or limb. In December it was the turn of the newspapers; France-Soir was bombed, provoking little more than an editorial demanding that “the French population has a right to be protected”; the editor-in-chief of Le Figaro wasplastiqué twice. The black-and-white flag of the OAS was impudently hoisted three times in a single day from the Gothic pinnacles of the Hôtel de Ville. On 4 January 1962, the OAS machine-gunned French Communist Party headquarters in the Place Kossuth. Later in January another thirteen bombings celebrated the second anniversary of “Barricades Week.” Among them, on 22 January, was a bomb set off in the Quai d’Orsay, which killed one employee and wounded twelve others, the most lethal incident so far. Plans captured by the Paris police enabled them to forestall, just in time, attempts to dynamite the Eiffel Tower and to explode another series of forty-eight bombs. But otherwise, as in Algiers, the metropolitan police showed an extraordinary lethargy in arresting any of the terrorist leaders.
BY NOW THE FRENCH PUBLIC was becoming thoroughly fed up with the OAS, and it would require but one more outrage for something to snap. It now occurred. On the morning of 7 February 1962, among ten other bombings that day, an OAS commando set out to bomb the Boulogne-sur-Seine home of André Malraux, de Gaulle’s Minister of Culture. Malraux lived upstairs, and anyway was absent that day. The plastique was detonated on the ground floor, close to where a four-year-old child, Delphine Renard, was playing with her dolls. It drove splinters of glass from the windows into her face, blinding her in one eye and painfully disfiguring her. A week later a silent and solemn procession, estimated at half a million strong and emotive of the commune, marched to Père Lachaise Cemetery. Nothing like it had been seen in Paris since the bloody days of February 1934; some reckoned it to be the biggest street turnout since the Liberation. Algérie Française was all but dead—killed by the OAS.
The organisation’s leader, Salan, was captured in Algeria in April 1962. However the last—and most nearly successful—attempt against de Gaulle took place in August at the Petit Clamart, just outside Paris. An OAS band equipped with machine-guns and led once again by Bastien-Thiry ambushed the President’s car, with Mme. de Gaulle in the back. The bullets passed behind his head and in front of the head of his wife. Never losing his composure, de Gaulle the soldier criticised the would-be assassins as “bad shots.” Equally unperturbed, Mme. de Gaulle remarked: “for my son-in-law, it would have been sad, but for the General and myself, it would have been a fine ending.”3 Bastien-Thiry was caught and shot, the first senior French officer to pass before a firing squad in many years. His death, and the last attempt to remove de Gaulle, were all to no avail. The second Evian talks had already concluded, with de Gaulle giving the FLN every concession—including the recently discovered Algerian oil which France had fought so hard to keep. The tricolore was finally lowered in Algeria. Amid tragic scenes, 1 million pieds noirs left the land and the homes that had belonged to many of them for three generations. It was a sell-out, but also a miracle, owing almost entirely to the remarkable boom in the economy, that France was able to assimilate, virtually overnight, so enormous an increment in her population. In independent Algeria, after brief intermissions of hope, killings between Algerians would continue to the present day. In France the fiercely satirical, generally heartless Canard Enchaîné took Parisians by surprise by printing in boldest caption: “To de Gaulle, from his Grateful Country: Once and for All, MERCI!”
YEARS LATER HAROLD MACMILLAN, Prime Minister at the time, remarked that whenever he had talked to de Gaulle “behind him I always saw the shadow of Algeria.”4 Typical of the man and the times, before the trial of the renegade Salan ended, it was eclipsed in the Paris press byrapportage of de Gaulle’s Élysée press conference on the European Common Market. Closing the European door to les anglo-saxons and pulling France out of NATO now assumed top priority for de Gaulle.
Political reform followed political reform, referendum upon referendum—until the French electorate tired of having to troop to the polls yet again. In fact, there were few fronts on which de Gaulle was not attacking with vigour and dedication in his first six plenipotential months. First and foremost there was the new constitution, involving a mountainous work of drafting and consultation. “I considered it necessary,” declared de Gaulle, “for the government to derive not from parliament, in other words from the parties, but, over and above them, from a leader directly mandated by the nation as a whole and empowered to choose, to decide and to act.”5 Henceforth the president would be elected by universal suffrage; the executive would emerge immeasurably strengthened, with many of the weaknesses that had been the undoing of the Third and Fourth Republics purged from the body politic. Well before the triumphant result of the constitutional referendum it was abundantly clear that henceforth France was now going to be ruled.
For the first time in nearly a hundred years, certainly for the first time under either the Third or Fourth Republic, France had a president vested with authority. Under the immense personal prestige of de Gaulle, a new national unity began to emerge. The debilitative wrangling of the parties was a thing of the past—so was any kind of political corruption. For the next few years France enjoyed a unique degree of stability, unique since the heyday of Louis-Napoleon. Critics might grumble at de Gaulle’s authoritarianism, that he was “Charles XI” or a new Bonaparte—but he was never a self-serving despot nor a would-be dictator. In his mystical “certain idea of France,” if there was any visible affinity, it was with Louis XIV, with his overriding pursuit of one thing:La grandeur de la France.
De Gaulle began to travel ever more widely, to remind the outside world of the sound of France’s “voice.” As he challenged the mighty dollar, it was a sound not always harmonious to the ears of her friends. The new year of peace, 1963, began with de Gaulle’s exclusion of Britain from entry into the EEC, with some brutality towards his loyal wartime colleague, Harold Macmillan. To Macmillan, wounded several times in the First World War, the Germans would ever remain a subject of distrust, if not dislike; de Gaulle, equally wounded in that war, and taken prisoner of war at Verdun in 1916, viewed the present differently—possibly with a more profoundly philosophic interpretation of history. No sooner had he dealt this blow to his old ally Macmillan (who had in fact done much to defend de Gaulle from the wrath of Churchill and Roosevelt) than de Gaulle was off to Germany, declaring “Long live Franco-German friendship!” and wooing a receptive Dr. Adenauer, like him a product of the Catholic world of pre-1914.80
In 1966, de Gaulle completed the break with NATO, explaining that France did not want to be drawn into any war not to her own liking. (From their Paris HQ the departure ceremony of the fourteen NATO nations took place with admirable good humour, British Army bands playing “Charlie Is My Darling”—as witty a musical rebuke as possible to the deliberately absent President de Gaulle.) He embarked France upon her own go-it-alone, nuclear force de frappe—its missiles aimed no longer at the Communist danger, but, in a muzzily menacing fashion, in all directions. He recognised Mao’s Peking, and in 1966 visited Khrushchev’s Soviet Union—to the consternation of the anglo-saxons. The Times observed that suddenly he seemed to be “the only active revolutionary in Europe.” And France was at last “free to look at France.”
DE GAULLE WAS ABLE TO WRITE in his memoirs, “France’s revival was in full flower. She had been threatened by civil war; bankruptcy had stared her in the face; the world had forgotten her voice. Now she was out of danger.” 6 Indeed, so it seemed. Life began to resume its course with customary celerity. The Brittany farmers embarked upon an “artichoke war,” to the discomfort of Parisians. Academicians began to fret about the incursions of franglais in the Assembly. The title of the new Vadim-Bardot film, Le Repos du guerrier (The Warrior’s Rest), seemed to set the tone. Already in 1962 France’s gross national product was rising by 6.8 per cent in the year. The politician Debré was replaced at the Matignon by the banker Pompidou.
Shed of the burden of Algeria, France’s economy at last began to show a blossoming from the thoughtful planting done in the latter years of the maligned Fourth Republic and the first four years of Gaullism. Similar initiatives in London would receive a cold shower of scepticism. Things were markedly different from the days of the Third Republic when France’s economic teaching was mocked by the British and Germans as backward. By 1964 a state visit from the President of Togoland revealed that in relative terms France was spending three times more of her GNP on the underdeveloped countries than the USA. Entering its seventh year, in 1965, the Fifth Republic showed its sudden miraculous fiscal prosperity with official reserves reaching $5 billion—unequalled in all Europe except for the mighty Bundesbank. Colour television came in—at a high cost per set. On 15 June 1964 the last French troops pulled out of Algeria, but the technical modernisation dreamed of by de Gaulle was already well under way.
Nevertheless, in the white heat of France’s sudden turnaround to prosperity, the old shadows were not entirely banished. The serpent of Communism was still very much alive and wriggling in its opposition to de Gaulle and his dirigiste handling of the economy. In 1967, Paris was paralysed by what the media recorded as the greatest strike by the greatest number of strikers that France had ever known. Accompanied by slogans of “Down with Pompidou!” and “No Government by Decree!,” it was not a strike for wages, but a purely political strike for purely political reasons. Around 150,000 workers paraded for three hours from the Bastille to the République. As one foreign correspondent observed, “only the sun and the moon continued their movements.”
NAPOLEON I NEVER FACED such disruption, and nor would de Gaulle let it deflect him from his grand conception of the nation—his “certaine idée de la France.” Like Napoleon, de Gaulle looked forward to a day when a magnificent new Paris might become the wonder, if not the formal capital of Europe. It was still overcrowded—with 143 people per acre compared with 43 in London. By 1962 population figures reached 7 million for greater Paris, though the central city had declined slightly in the twentieth century to 2.7 million. With his ultimate lofty objective in mind, de Gaulle made the inspired choice of appointing André Malraux as his Minister of Culture, which post he held until 1969—charged with taking Paris in hand. Under this remarkable man, eleven years younger than de Gaulle—writer and artist, philosopher, aesthete and man of action, fighter with the Republicans in Spain, convert from Communism, scourge of both left and right, and member of the Resistance, whose life resembled a novel that might have been written by Malraux—the stones of Paris came to life again. It was Malraux who was responsible for the blanchissage(whitening) of Paris, digging out the lower floor of the Louvre’s Cour Carrée and returning it to its pristine glory, and restoring the Marais, with the Place des Vosges, dilapidated almost to the point of total destruction, as its pièce de résistance.
This blanchissage of Paris totally transformed much of the capital. So did works begun on the remarkable RER express underground system, capable of whisking Parisians on silent rubber wheels from Saint-Germain to the Étoile in four minutes during the rush hour, at 60 m.p.h., to become the envy of London’s wretched urban travellers. Less felicitous, at least in the view of this writer, were architectural scandals like the Tour Montparnasse (started in 1969, but not finished until 1973), the greatest urban project since Haussmann, and designed to be the highest skyscraper in all Europe, menacing the ascendancy of the Eiffel Tower and the Invalides. Then came Richard Rogers’ Centre Pompidou, the unhappy child of the first international competition ever held in Paris, and which looked as if it might not still be standing by the millennium (alas, it was, just). There was the great and windy complex out at La Défense (where the last battle of the siege of 1870–71 was fought and lost) and various other high-rise developments ringing Paris and threatening its historic skyline. Swallowing up ancient woodland like the Forêt de Sénart, Paris built itself into the twentieth century. One horrible dormitory complex of 300,000 new flats was built in the form of a wriggling snake, nearly half a mile long.
UNDER MALRAUX’S GENIUS many great art retrospectives were held in the 1960s: but by 1964 he was left grumbling that, whereas a few years ago some 3000 people every evening sat at home watching television, now it was 3 million. “You can put unimportant things on the screen,” he observed gloomily. “Make no mistake about it, modern civilisation is in the process of putting its immense resources at the service of what used to be called the Devil.” Earlier in 1964 another powerful grumble was heard about French culture, on a theme close to the General’s heart. Paris bookshops were filled with a wittily written book on a most serious subject by a professor of literature at the Sorbonne, René Étiemble: Parlez-vous franglais? It slated the insidious creeping into the sacred language of such barbaric usage as le week-end, le booking, le snack and le quick(pronounced queek)—and un baby Scotch sur les rocks. Not without reason, the learned professor deplored that
Since the Liberation, our blood has become much diluted . . . the vocabulary of the young generation that will be twenty years old in 1972 is already one-fourth composed of American words. At 20 these young people will not be able to read Molière, let alone Marcel Proust.
Apart from resolving the sex of the automobile, what was the Académie doing? Soon the fear of franglais was followed up by the opening of a new American-style “drugstore” in Saint-Germain, right opposite Sartre’s fortress at the Flore.
In 1963, within a few hours of her friend, Jean Cocteau, Edith Piaf died—the tiny sparrow figure in the plain black dress, who had done so much to cloak a glum Paris in the 1940s with the warm light of “La Vie en Rose,” going on to enchant the wide world beyond her Montmartre with “Milord” and the paras’ favourite, her tragic, autobiographic, “Je ne regrette rien”:
Farewell to love with its tremolo.
I start again at zéro . . .
All France grieved. Forty thousand turned up to accompany her to her simple grave in Père Lachaise. Meanwhile women in Paris’s oldest profession, who had always found a sympathetic friend in Piaf, were suffering a hard time under de Gaulle, doubtless influenced by his sternly moral wife “Tante Yvonne.” Determined to clean up Paris, he reactivated a draconian 330-year-old law that threatened, with the forfeiture of his property, any landlord who allowed prostitutes to work in his premises. Business was stricken. On another level conventional morality was under siege by François Mitterrand, in opposition. He seized on France’s archaic attitudes to family planning and contraception, long a taboo subject, making them political issues. With joy the Paris gossip columnists leaped on the young pro-pill generation, jeering at its Catholic opponents as les lapinistes, or rabbit clan, devoted to a culture of excessive fertility.
BY THE MID-1960s, despite all the material benefits that his regime had brought about, what de Gaulle dubbed the “snarlers and grousers” were soon raising their voices in anticipation of the end of the Fifth Republic and an electoral replacement of the solitary ruler in the Élysée. Could it be that he had served his purpose? That once again in its history France, Paris, s’ennuyait? As he once acidly remarked, “How can you govern a country that has 246 varieties of cheese!” The presidential elections of 1965 ended with de Gaulle gaining only 44 per cent of the vote. Humiliatingly for him, there had to be a second ballot. Ten-and-a-half million votes had gone to the new star on the now united left, François Mitterrand, who had suddenly proved himself a most effective orator. Janet Flanner of the New Yorker compared the results to “a famous public fountain losing its soaring strength”; but she was being premature when she claimed that “the extraordinary Fifth Republic of General de Gaulle ended when he failed to be reelected its President”7on that first election.
The sparkling period of economic expansion had run out of steam; Frenchmen began to hoard gold once more. The next political blow to de Gaulle came at the beginning of 1967 when his protégé, the brilliant young énarque economist, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, launched a new splinter Gaullist Party. It had considerable success in the parliamentary elections, which reduced de Gaulle’s majority to a dangerously small margin of just one seat. Still the barometer looked set fair; at his twice-yearly press conference in the Élysée in November 1966, de Gaulle was able to declare: “We have nothing dramatic to say today. In contrast to the past, France right now is not living in any drama.” 8
There was a certain smug unspoken comparison to Lyndon B. Johnson’s America, crippled as it was by the ongoing nightmare of Vietnam. The press conference at the same time the following year, November 1967, provoked Le Figaro to voice the unmentionable with a witty cartoon captioned “What would I do if I didn’t have me . . .?” When one correspondent had dared enquire about “après Gaullisme,” the seventy-seven-year-old President had replied with considerable verve, “Everything always has an end, and everyone eventually comes to a finish, though for the moment that is not the case.” “Après de Gaulle might begin tonight, or in six months, or even a year,” he continued. “However, if I wanted to make some people laugh and others groan, I could say that it might just as likely go on as it is now for ten years, or even fifteen. But, frankly, I don’t think so.” Correspondents present laughed nervously at this display of hubris, as de Gaulle went on to offend in turn the United States, the Queen of England, the non-French Canadians of her Commonwealth, the British Labour government in again refusing English entry into the Common Market, Israel and world Jewry, and President Johnson and his hawks by reference to the “odious” Vietnam War. Nor could his words have greatly pleased the Chinese or the Russian Communists. His performance was viewed as a remarkable tour de force for a seventy-seven-year-old with no identifiable problems on the horizon himself.
But what a shock lay in store within only a few brief months, at the coming of 1968. A kind of universal madness sets its stamp on the year—surely one of the most troublesome and nasty, yet exciting, of the post-war era. It was the year of violent student revolt, and of assassination. It determined the defeat of America in Vietnam and a fall in Paris. It also displayed the fissures that were to bring the whole Soviet monolith toppling more than two decades later. Some caught up in it likened 1968 to that other year of revolution, 1848, when old political structures across Europe had collapsed like the walls of Jericho—not least in Paris, where the events of February 1848 had brought down that easygoing, liberal king, Louis-Philippe. In Britain the year began with Malcolm Muggeridge resigning as rector of Edinburgh University over plans to offer the pill free to students. In America, Dr. Benjamin Spock of nursery fame was indicted for anti-draft activities, while in Russia writer Alexander Ginsburg was gaoled for “slandering the state.” Such events were indications of what 1968 held in store.
On 31 January, the peace talks that were shortly to begin in Paris were pre-empted in South Vietnam by the Viet Cong seizing advantage of the traditional New Year’s Tet celebrations to launch a major coordinated series of attacks on South Vietnamese cities. US forces were thoroughly taken by surprise, and briefly it looked as if the Viet Cong had won. Nevertheless the US forces reacted with vigour, inflicting a clear-cut defeat on the Communists. But America was stunned by the announcement that President Johnson, worn down by Vietnam and anti-war protest, would not be a candidate in the 1970 presidential elections. French watching their new colour televisions cheered as Jean-Claude Killy won three golds in the Winter Olympics, and—in Prague—as a heady “Prague Spring” broke out when Alexander Dubček stunned the world by relaxing press censorship and arresting the Chief of Police. For a few rapturous weeks it looked as if Czechoslovakia would regain the freedom it had lost twenty years previously.
In Paris anti-Americanism was bolstered by noisy Vietnam demonstrations—and given an extra spin by the horrendous news of the assassination of Martin Luther King, in Memphis, Tennessee. About the same time, in Germany, a left-wing student called Rudi Dutschke was shot in the head by a gunman claiming to emulate the King killing. Dutschke survived, but the shooting triggered off student riots across Germany. In France, de Gaulle’s Premier Pompidou was able to declare comfortably that there was “no opposition capable of overthrowing us, much less capable of replacing us.”
Then the Sorbonne exploded.
IT ALL BEGAN, back in February, at Nanterre, a new and particularly drab suburban campus surrounded by mud, combining the worst features of American and French universities. Its graffiti-plastered concrete still seemed to belong more to backward, revolution-torn Bolivia than to Gaullist Paris in the second half of the twentieth century. Founded as an overflow for the overwhelmed Sorbonne, Nanterre already had over 12,000 students in inadequate accommodation, with only 240 professors and assistant professors. There was a lack of warm food, and canteen queues could last an hour and a half; hence there was plenty of time for revolutionary chat. As a subject, sociology (described by some French intellectuals as affording “certificates in anarchy”)9 predominated, under left-wing professors on whom the mantle of Herbert Marcuse rested heavily. Most of the students, however, came (by car) from the essentially bourgeois arrondissements of western Paris. Shades of 1848! To be exiled there, instead of going to the Sorbonne, must have felt like being a noble exiled from the court of Louis XIV. On graduation they were faced with either no jobs, or dreary ones. Thus it was not unnatural that, if student revolt were to break out in Paris, it should be at Nanterre.
Many at Nanterre were bored bourgeois youth—boys come to establish themselves in the same building as girls who, like protagonists in a Sagan novel, were also bored. Equally shocking to less liberated spirits were graffiti proclaiming “merde au bonheur.” Recalling by comparison the real deprivations of the war and yet how happy Paris had been in 1944, an académicien like Maurice Druon found such sentiments in an age of stable prosperity quite “devastating”; for “Youth had never been more free, but never complained so much about being oppressed.” 10 What to do? Helpfully the Gaullist Minister of Education told the Nanterre students to take a cold bath. On 4 May, Nanterre was placed in suspension.
Revolt was carried from Nanterre to the Sorbonne by a red-headed firebrand, Danny Cohn-Bendit, who was not even French, but the son of affluent German Jews. The date coincided with the opening of the Vietnam peace conference, and it so happened the tenth anniversary of de Gaulle coming to power—a moment for ten years of accumulated grievance to light up with student discontent.
THE SORBONNE appeared to have changed little since the age of Napoleon—if not the Middle Ages. The place was neglected—not only physically dingy and sad, but with little attention paid to the task of education. As Raymond Aron recalled:
The best students continued to take exams and their degrees without ever setting foot in the Sorbonne. The others were left to themselves, except for the help provided by the assistant. The professor, for the most part, did nothing but deliver lectures. My weekly schedule consisted of three hours . . .11
By 1968 the Sorbonne had become obscenely overcrowded: with 130,000 students it totalled more than Oxford and Cambridge together—more than the total population of Paris at the time of its founder, Abelard. Aron recalled one colleague who had published nothing in twenty years, and who “had accomplished the considerable feat of having virtually no students at his lectures.” It was by no means unusual for a professor to start the year with 150 students in his lectures, and end up with none. Every professor was “supreme master of his Chair below God.” There was a complete absence of any obligation or sanction.
In sum, with dreadful overcrowding in lecture halls, Mandarinisme on the part of the teachers, the absence of any form of pre-selection, over-centralisation, bureaucratism, the fossilisation of the syllabus, and the tyranny of endless examinations, the Paris students of May 1968 had a case. Thus, at the Sorbonne in May 1968, Daniel Cohn-Bendit and his enragés from Nanterre found the most inflammable material. Egged on by their own professors, they then widened their target from establishing student power to turning a university revolt into a social and political revolution.
ON THE AFTERNOON OF FRIDAY, 4 May, the head of the Sorbonne, Rector Jean Roche, called in the Paris police. It was an act that violated the sanctuary of the university, maintained over many centuries, and an unpardonable academic error. The next day the police in their paniers à salade moved in, closing the Sorbonne and arresting 596 students. Predictably, the traditionally brutal CRS detachments overreacted, causing many hundred casualties. Fortunately there were no deaths; given the heat already generated on the Left Bank streets it is hard to imagine how far insurgent violence might have gone had only a few young students been mown down by CRS bullets. The students took to the streets, and occupied the Sorbonne buildings, brought in a piano, played and sang through the night and slept in the empty classrooms. Around the university and the “Boul’ Mich” they set to digging up the cube-shaped pavé, sawing down ancient plane trees and dragging up burnt-out cars to construct barricades—just as their ancestors had done in the past century. What caught all foreign journalists by surprise in the early days of les évènements was the remarkable spontaneity, the atmosphere of exultation and wild euphoria, evocative of the early halcyon days of the Commune. To the deep disgust of academics like Aron and Druon, in the initial euphoria there were numerous cases of professors supporting the students, chemistry teachers showing them how to make a Molotov cocktail.
What had started as a student protest edged towards full-scale political revolution, aimed at nothing less than the overthrow of the de Gaulle government. New slogans appeared—and not just on the Left Bank adjacent to the Sorbonne: “Ten years, that’s enough!” “De Gaulle to the museum!” and “De Gaulle to the stake!”
By mid-May, 3 million workers had come out on strike, a week later numbers had risen to 10 million. With garbage piling up in the streets, no petrol in the pumps and food running short, the Banque de France itself went out; as well as the engravers at the Mint, so banknotes were also running short. The Pompidou government had at least prevented “Robespierre” Cohn-Bendit returning from Germany, where he had gone on a visit.
The greatest turn of fortune for a beleaguered regime came, however, when students tried to spread the revolt to the big Renault works at Billancourt. Striking workers occupied the plant (as they had done in 1936), but would not join forces and fulfil the Marxist dream of workers and students marching hand in hand. The workers’ aloofness came partly on account of the bourgeois origins of the striking students—les fils à papa, as they scathingly dubbed them. The schism was palpably more between generations than classes, between youth and its elders.
Taking advantage of the revolt, the pègres—those of the underworld—began to join in. Property and shops became at risk. People who had at first supported the revolt now became increasingly alienated by its anarchic, nihilist face. Returning from America during the third week of les évènements, Raymond Aron was forced to ask himself, “Am I still in France, or Cuba . . . or in some weird country? Can this country which is gripped by collective madness, really be France?”12
DE GAULLE AND POMPIDOU returned from their leisurely travels in the east to a swiftly worsening crisis. But still the government did virtually nothing to reverse the slide into chaos. Paris was alive with rumours, but the most disturbing—in the last turbulent week of May—was that de Gaulle had bolted. It looked like a repeat of what he had done in 1946, when in his disgust with French party politics he had retreated to Colombey-les-Deux-Églises. The truth was that, in what seemed like panic, and without telling his prime minister, on Wednesday 29 May de Gaulle did fly mysteriously out of Paris, eastwards. For a moment, Pompidou believed he was following in the footsteps of Louis-Philippe. In fact he had headed to Baden-Baden, to get the support of General Massu and the French Army in Germany; but he had indeed departed in deep pessimism and evidently told Massu, “I have had it up to here. I can’t stand it any more and I am leaving.” Massu urged him not to; minutes later de Gaulle admitted that he had “had this moment of weakness; because I am too old, and I must go.” “I cannot fight against apathy, against the desire of a whole people to let itself break apart.” However, the ever-dependable Massu assured de Gaulle that the army would remain loyal. The deal was that de Gaulle would amnesty distinguished soldiers like Challe and Salan, currently languishing in gaol for their roles in the 1961 putsch—to rehabilitate the army’s repute.
The following day de Gaulle returned—deeply unpopular though he had become, walking tall once more—to broadcast the last powerful appeal of his career. A tremendous rallying cry, it came only just in time. Using crude barrack-room language, he dismissed the students as chie-en-lits (shit-abeds), while in uncompromising terms he accused the Communists of seeking “an international autocracy.” As Raymond Aron saw it,
One fighting speech from an old man of 78, and the people of France rediscovered the sense of reality, petrol pumps and holidays. We still have to come to understand this episode of French history—a history rich in strange episodes.
It was to be the last time the master of language and persuasion would be able to deploy the old magic. But it worked. That very same evening the Champs-Élysées filled with 100,000 pro-Gaullist counter-demonstrators, a sea of blue-white-red tricolores protesting against the red of anarchy and Communism, assembled with a spontaneity as remarkable as that with which les évènements had broken out in the first place.
France’s most breathlessly frightening month since the war was over. It now had to count the cost.
THE BILLS FOR PARIS’ MONTH OF MADNESS were soon coming in—ff150 million, over £13 million or $30 million. By the following year the total bill would come to something more like $2–3 billion—resulting, in the words of Georges Pompidou, in a “slow haemorrhage” in the nation’s finances. Devaluation of the franc became unavoidable. The first item was for the relaying in the streets around the Boul’ Mich’ of a million stone paving blocks, prised up by the students to construct barricades. After a century-and-a-half of insurrections and barricades, the city fathers finally decided to tar over the pavé. The workers were placated by a huge wage boost of 10–14 per cent. But the invisible, long-term cost to Paris of 1968 was greater still: the international art market began to abandon its traditional home for London and New York.
For the Sorbonne—an ancient institution in disarray—a new law was hurriedly adopted. Thereby the old university of 130,000, proven impossible to administer, was broken up into thirteen successors each of a maximum of 20,000 members. But the revolting students did not get the participation in university governance for which they had clamoured. The elite École Normale Supérieure, the Polytechnique and the École Nationale d’Administration remained largely untouched. For at least a year, students at the Sorbonne learned nothing at all; then they went back to their studies—the fun was over.
THE NEW YEAR OF 1969 opened as if nothing had happened in Paris the previous May. Spring brought yet another referendum, the fifth of the Fifth Republic. This time it was a much discussed scheme to modernise and streamline the paralysing centralisation of the country on Paris, which dated back to Louis XIV and beyond, and to reorganise the Senate. It was not a major issue, but a thoroughly sensible measure, part of de Gaulle’s programme for France “marrying her age.” As with past referendums, it demanded simply a “Yes” or a “No” at the polls, framed as a choice “between progress and upheaval.” But France was bored with going to the polls, with de Gaulle and his measures. La France s’ennuit.
On 10 April, de Gaulle gave a television interview in which he abruptly declared that, if the referendum failed, he ought not continue as chief of state. The challenge was there. The bill ran to several thousand words long; many voters never received their copy. On a poor turnout the referendum was lost by a narrow margin of 47–53 per cent. Immediately, de Gaulle packed up and departed from the Élysée, pausing only to shake hands with Colonel Laurent, commander of his palace military guard, and to issue the tersest of communiqués to an ungrateful people: “I am ceasing to exercise my functions as President of the Republic. This decision takes effect from midnight tonight.”13 There was no constitutional reason whatsoever for him to resign; but over the past months he had been expressing disillusion to his intimates: “What’s the point of all that I am doing? . . . nothing has any importance . . .”14 Was he seeking an excuse to go? It seemed almost like Samson pulling down the columns at Gaza. After over a decade in residence, only one small van sufficed to remove all the baggage of the General and his wife.
The Republic survived, dedicating itself to improving law and order, and the pursuit of economic and technical efficiency. De Gaulle’s departure was in no way followed by the chaos he had so often predicted. This in itself seemed almost like one more sign of disrespect from an ungrateful populace, who had turned on this ageing general just as they had turned on Pétain, Louis-Napoleon, Louis-Phillippe and Charles X before him. De Gaulle took himself off to storm-battered western Ireland, to contemplate. The following year he died at Colombey-les-Deux-Églises—dans son village et son chagrin. “France is a widow,” declared the new president.
It was indeed the end of an epoch—an epoch which, through the person of de Gaulle, stretched back to the wars in Algeria and IndoChina, and to the Second World War, the Occupation, Liberation and épuration, and beyond to the turbulent, depressing 1930s and even to the First World War, where he himself had fallen wounded on the hideous field of Verdun and was made a German prisoner of war. It marked the end of the most personal experiment in modern government that France has known since Napoleon Bonaparte had grasped the crown imperial to place it on his own head in Notre-Dame.
On de Gaulle’s departure the inevitable parallels were also drawn to Saint Louis and Philippe-Auguste; but he had given his country a strong regime without ever falling for the institutional brutality of fascism— whatever his foes on the left might say. He had, it could be claimed, saved the country of which he cherished that romantic, mystical “certain idea,” once, twice, three times and more. He had changed the intangible map of Europe, and France’s position on it. Then, on the turn of a poll, he lost faith. Yet, in the Fifth Republic which he had created, he had left much on which the future could build. For one thing, by some curious kind of osmosis his successors living in the grandeur of the Élysée Palace would all acquire the presidential profile that had been stamped on the coinage by the lofty General—even a man affecting to be so much of the people as François Mitterrand.