In the glow of the first he never lost sight of the second objective. Thus, after a rendezvous with Leclerc and a Resistance representative at the Gare Montparnasse, he went first, not to the Hôtel de Ville where the other Resistance leaders were awaiting him, but to the Ministry of War in the rue St Dominique where he installed himself in the office (curiously quite unchanged) out of which he had been prised by the government’s evacuation of Paris on 10 June 1940. Then, having established both continuity and a grip on the levers of authority, he did go to the Hôtel de Ville, but via police headquarters (thus putting his hand on another lever), and when he got there announced his triumphant parade down the Champs Elysées for the following afternoon. He thought that ‘perhaps two million people’ attended. ‘Ah! C’est la mer,’ he recorded himself as saying, ‘And I, in the midst of it all, feel not a person but an instrument of destiny.’ From the Concorde he went to Notre Dame for a Te Deum. Thus did he seek a reunion of state and Church which had been rare since 1870, and only intermittent since 1789.
Three days later he organized a more surprising parade over the same mile and a half of grand avenue. He and General Omar Bradley reviewed an American march past. Eisenhower said it was at de Gaulle’s request. He wanted to show the Resistance that if there was any trouble he had the big battalions on his side. If the explanation was correct it was a striking illustration of his ability not only to use pride when he wished but also to subordinate it when that too served his purpose.
Ten weeks later on 11 November there was a third Champs Elysées parade. At a time of severe adversity Churchill had said to de Gaulle: ‘One day we’ll go down the Champs Elysées together.’ He was determined to do so, and de Gaulle recognized that he had to discharge the obligation. But in the pictures they do not match. Churchill looked determinedly happy. De Gaulle looked sour. He did not like sharing occasions. It was the less attractive side of his character. By then, however, he was engaged not in looking forward to governing a liberated although impoverished and divided France but in the more intractable task of actually doing it, and, this first time round, was proving by no means adept.
The last months of 1944 were not, however, too bad. He was mostly as well received in the provinces as in Paris. He made his writ run throughout the country, and successfully surmounted the biggest obstacle to the authority of the state by insisting on the incorporation of the Resistance militias into the regular army. He established a coalition government, including two Communists, but presided over it with an icy discipline rather than a democratic camaraderie. In 1945 he was excluded from the Yalta and Potsdam conferences but given, thanks to Churchill’s pressure on Roosevelt, an occupation zone in Germany and a permanent seat on the UN Security Council. In spite of these concessions he continued to provoke his more powerful allies. He refused an invitation to meet Roosevelt in Algiers on the President’s last journey back to the United States. And two months after Roosevelt’s death Churchill was telling Truman that de Gaulle was ‘the worst enemy of France in her troubles’ and ‘one of the greatest dangers to European peace’.
Nineteen forty-five also brought victory, but that for de Gaulle was no more than a postscript to the Liberation. In addition it brought the re-emergence of party politics in France. De Gaulle wished to be above them and in July took the decision not to field candidates for the October elections to a new Assembly that was not only to control the government but to frame a new constitution for a new Republic. This Constituent Assembly, in which the Communists were the largest party but were closely followed by the new MRP (which was loosely but not loyally Gaullist) and they by the Socialists, proceeded in November unanimously to elect de Gaulle President of the Government, but then to spend the remaining six weeks of the year in ensuring that he had as little power as possible. The Fourth Republic, just as much as the Third, was to be dominated by the shifting alliances of a legislative chamber which neither the head of state nor the head of government had power to dissolve. This was wholly contrary to de Gaulle’s ideas, and his mind began to move towards resignation, a destination at which it arrived on 20 January 1946.
His resignation statement was brief, in a way brutal for it set out the alternative with an almost unnecessary starkness, yet it was essentially unchallenging, for it deliberately turned away from ‘a general on a white horse’ scenario. ‘The exclusive regime of the political parties has returned. I condemn it. But, unless I use force to set up a dictatorship, which I do not desire, and which would doubtless come to a bad end, I have no means of preventing this experiment. So I must retire.’