Portraits and Miniatures(42)
His Algerian policy was both a greater reversal of alliances and his most signal presidential service to France. The conditions for his coming to power had been created by a cabal of generals who thought that the politicians of the Fourth Republic were hopelessly wet in their weak underpinning of the permanence of Algérie Française, and over the next four years he proceeded to show that they were indeed hopelessly wet because they would never have had the courage to sever the link and get the poison of la sale guerre out of the veins of France. De Gaulle did precisely this, and in the course of doing so employed one of the most memorable ambiguities in the history of politics. When he looked at the hysterical crowd of pieds noirs outside the Governement- Général in Algiers on the evening of 4 June 1958 and said ‘Je vous ai compris,’ it was interpreted as a commitment of support, may well have been delivered with mixed emotions at the time, but turned out to be a disdainful dismissal.
Freed of the incubus of Algeria and responding unexpectedly well to the stimulus of the Common Market, France enjoyed a period of rapid growth, currency stability and mounting prosperity in which much of the work done by Monnet’s Commissariat du Plan under the Fourth Republic redounded to the credit of the Fifth. But it was due to de Gaulle that its benefits did not drain away into the sands of Algeria and that the new France had the political panache to turn the economic success into international influence. At first de Gaulle, while preaching against too much subservience to an American-dominated NATO, played a hard cold war hand at moments of crisis. When the Berlin Wall was built in 1961 he was the only Western leader in favour of reacting with force. In 1962 when Kennedy confronted Khrushchev in the Cuban missile crisis he was more forthright in his support than either Macmillan or Adenauer. From 1963 onwards, however, with the Algerian war behind him and with the Khrushchev threat greatly reduced after Cuba, he began to take an increasingly anti-American line: on Vietnam; on the growing weakness of the dollar, which made the United States’ assumption of currency hegemony increasingly intolerable; on the nuclear test ban treaty; on the independent cultivation of relations with both China and the Soviet satellites; and on the attempt to build up a special French position in South America.
On some of these points de Gaulle was more sensible than Washington. But in his last years of power he began to go over several tops. Nineteen sixty-seven was a vintage year. In June, at the time of the Six-Day War, he switched from the traditional French pro-Israeli line and half-denounced the Jews as ‘an élite people, self-confident and dominating’. In July he went to Canada and proclaimed le Québec libre from the balcony of the Montreal City Hall. His visit had to be cut short before he got to Ottawa. In September he went to Poland and there made remarks almost as offensive to the Soviet union as his Quebec ones had been both to Ottawa and to Washington. In October he was actively supporting the Biafran revolt against the Nigerian Government, a policy that was regarded as hostile in both London and Washington. In November he dismissed Britain’s second application to join the European Community before the negotiations had even opened. Later that same month he encouraged his Chief of Defence Staff to announce that the French nuclear deterrent would be à tous azimuts, in other words targeted in all directions, including America. (No French missile could have begun to reach there, but that introduced bathos rather than moderation into the proposition; tous azimuts did, however, help to give the French deterrent support from all directions, including the Communist Party, within France.)
Inside as well as outside France ‘the shipwreck of old age’ was felt to be beginning. He was seventy-seven, much younger than Adenauer had been at the end of his Chancellorship but wearing less well. And so it proved to be. The year of 1968 was downhill nearly all the way; 1969 was a year of defeat and resignation, followed by six weeks of retreat in Ireland and a coldly unhelpful attitude towards the presidency of Georges Pompidou, who had been his Prime Minister throughout six years of great Fifth Republican success. Nineteen seventy brought almost complete solitude (except for the company of his wife) at Colombey, rather hasty work on his second and post-1958 series of memoirs, and sudden death, at an age two weeks short of eighty, on 9 November. ‘France is a widow,’ said Pompidou in what was probably the best phrase of his life. He could not compete with de Gaulle in that or many other respects, but nor could any other figure of the mid-twentieth century, except for his two old enemies/allies, Churchill and Roosevelt.