A Savage War of Peace by Alistair Horne

Author:Alistair Horne
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-59017-481-4
Publisher: New York Review Books

Preoccupations in France

Less readily visible to the army and pieds noirs alike in Algeria was one fundamental reason for de Gaulle’s dilatoriness in formulating an Algerian policy: his preoccupation with the Augean stables in France herself. The Gaullist programme called for the most thorough overhaul of France’s whole political system, economy and finances—left in a critical tangle by previous governments of the Fourth Republic—and her foreign relations and alliances. 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”. 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, and her voice heard abroad. Already in mid-September de Gaulle was writing to Eisenhower and Macmillan, informing them that N.A.T.O. “was no longer adapted to the needs of our defence…the alliance should henceforth be placed under a triple rather than a dual direction, failing which France would take no further part”. In equally brutal language he was soon torpedoing Macmillan’s hopes for a Free Trade Area in Europe; while to his intimates he was revealing his ambitions to create a truly modern army at the earliest opportunity: “As soon as the Algerian war is ended, I shall form five atomic divisions….”

After the uncertainties of the last days of the Fourth Republic, and the real fears of May, the new authority and majesty of de Gaulle had the most immediate and galvanising effect upon the French nation at large; the full quality of which effect one tends to forget even at this short distance in time. On his first official visit to Paris in June, Macmillan noted already how the large crowds “all seemed very relaxed and in a most friendly mood…I have never seen a French crowd cheer in such a friendly way…everyone is confident that the General’s policy will succeed. No one knows what it will be—all the same it commands general confidence”. The coming of de Gaulle was suddenly seen to liberate one of those surges of the immense reservoir of energy that characterises the French nation, and her truly staggering moral as well as material regeneration now began. Some of the eternal aspects continued unchanged; after countless man-hours of deliberation, the Académie announced that it was changing the sex of the automobile. But as Janet Flanner observed in October, “the Western democratic peoples now eye France with real hope for the first time since November, 1945”.

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