He did not want a coup. But he certainly expected more dismay at his departure than was manifested. The politicians, even the MRP, did not mind. Nor, it appeared, did the public. And France’s allies were rather relieved. Colombey-les-Deux-Eglises was not rehabilitated until five months later, and de Gaulle at first merely went to Marly in the royal forests of the Ile-de-France. His proximity to Paris led to no press of crowds to draw him back. In June he began his nearly twelve years of retreat in the Haute Marne. They were, however, divided sharply into two parts. Until 1953 he endeavoured to come back to power through the RPF (Rally of the French People), the programme for which he had outlined at Bayeux nine months earlier and the launch of which he proclaimed at Strasbourg in April 1947. His choice of locations was fully exploitative of his reputation: the Norman town where he had first re-mingled with the French people at the beginning of the Liberation and the Alsatian city that he had saved from reoccupation by the Germans in rough encounters with Eisenhower and Churchill as a consequence of the last Ardennes flourish of the Third Reich at the end of 1944.
He became neither the first nor the last man to use the back-cloth of national glories for partisan political purposes. What was more surprising was that he did so with only modified success. His rallies were commanding, perhaps a little too much so for democratic taste, but his supporters were not entirely satisfactory, too few of his left-of-centre adherents of London days and too many of those who had been content to go along with Vichy, and a feeling that more than at any other stage of his career he was being driven towards the shores of reaction. The electoral performance followed a pattern sometimes experienced by new political movements. Seven months after its launch the RPF polled 40 per cent in municipal elections. But municipal elections do not determine political destiny. When the next national elections came the RPF was down to 21.5 per cent of the vote. This gave them 120 seats in the Assembly. But what were they to do with them? Eventually half their deputies decided they wanted to play the game of parliamentary power broking and drifted out of the General’s control and into successive Fourth Republican governments.
That was effectively the end of the RPF, which had throughout been one of the less glorious chapters of de Gaulle’s career. For the remaining five years before his return to power he was in almost full retreat at Colombey. He worked at his memoirs, and the first two volumes appeared to great acclaim in October 1956 and June 1958. He tried one more political manifestation. In May 1954 on the feast of Joan of Arc he announced that he would appear at the Étoile and lay a wreath on the tomb of the Unknown Soldier, and implicitly invited a mass silent demonstration. It was not a success. As he got into his car after the ceremony he murmured ‘Le peuple n’est pas tellement là.’ He gave only one press conference in four years, his very occasional speeches were commemorative rather than political, and his solitude was broken only by occasional visits from faithful adherents, Courcel, Guichard, Debré, Malraux, or, still less frequently, from one of two more independent politicians - Mendés-France, for example, for whom he had a certain regard.
The flame of his hope of a return must have flickered very low as the years advanced - he was sixty-seven in the autumn of 1957 - and his body was manifestly ageing. This sense of time running out may have pushed him to sail as close as he did to the shores of illegality, and even of disrepute, on the route by which he came back to power. He did not mount a military coup and therefore did not directly contradict his abnegatory dictum of January 1946. But he allowed the explicit threat of a military rebellion in Algiers, and the implicit threat that it would spread to Paris, to destroy the Pflimlin Government, the last of the Fourth Republic, and to cause both Pflimlin and President Coty to seek a legal transfer of power to de Gaulle. Until this was secure de Gaulle declined to curb the rebellious generals. On the contrary he heightened the tension by referring to ‘the collapse of the state’ and announcing his own readiness to assume once more, as in June 1940, ‘the powers of the Republic’. If this did not happen, he would leave the regime to die in the ditch of its own weakness.
Coty was convinced that de Gaulle was the only alternative to civil war and determined to commission him as Prime Minister. There were still difficulties with the political groups. The Socialists were the key. De Gaulle received the two most prominent, Mollet, the Premier of the Suez adventure, and Vincent Auriol, President of the Republic from 1947 to 1954, at Colombey and persuaded them of his attachment to Republican democracy. Nevertheless, they were able to carry the Socialist parliamentary group by only seventy-seven votes to seventy-four. The majority of the minority then accepted group discipline and with it de Gaulle was endorsed in an Assembly vote by 329 to 224 with thirty-two abstentions. The margin was not vast, particularly in view of the Socialist ‘block vote’. The meat the Assembly had been required to swallow was, however, very strong. The next day it had to vote special powers for the new head of government to restore order in Algeria and in France and to draw up a new constitution, and then put itself into recess, at one of the most critical moments in the history of post-war France, for four and a half months. Once elected, de Gaulle’s democratic behaviour was almost as impeccable as he had managed to convince Mollet and Auriol that it would be, but the methods by which he came to power remain less admirable. It is rare for so much that is respectable and desirable to come out of such an ambiguous beginning.