The Atlantic and Its Enemies (24 page)

9

Europe 1958

General de Gaulle is supposed to have said, when Algeria left, that the moment had come for ‘Europe’. There, France would be remade. It mattered that French self-confidence had taken a battering in the middle of the 1950s. French post-war aims, of taking over German resources, had been frustrated, and the Monnet Plan had not worked, at least not in the intended sense. There was a constant shortage of dollars for imports, and the franc was devalued again and again. This all became much worse because of the political system. It reflected the concerns of the old France, and the politicians of 1945 were scared enough by the authoritarian ways of the Vichy regime - and the potential authoritarianism of de Gaulle - not to want a strong executive. The parliamentarians kept decisive powers in their own hands, and arranged for a powerless presidency. This was made worse because the party that held the balance of power - the Radicals - had not been solid. Even their constitution said that they were in effect allowed to split, and they reflected local realities that often had little to do with national matters. Snap votes could destroy a government’s majority, if a prime minister were inept, and a government crisis would duly follow. Then the politicians failed to agree, and governments kept changing in a way that might have been harmless if times were easy, but now appeared ridiculous. There was one government after another - when the final crisis of the Fourth Republic began on 15 April 1958 it was the seventeenth or the twenty-second, depending upon how you define ‘crisis’. Five weeks went by before a Félix Gaillard assembled a thin majority to replace a Maurice Bourgès-Maunoury on 5 November 1957, and the crisis that began with Gaillard’s overthrow on 15 April 1958 had still not been resolved when the final act of the Fourth Republic began on 13 May. As the historian René Rémond comments, there was a sort of liturgy involved as each of the participants - president, party leaders,
etc.
- knew how the ceremonial went, and it developed its own vocabulary: lifting the mortgage, wiping the slate, testing the slopes, sending back the lift,
etc.
Karl Marx, asked why it was that the non-socialists produced so many divisions, answered, thunderously, ‘It is in the nature of the petty bourgeoisie to be subjective. ’ The Algerian affair brought about change, at last (as, curiously enough, the beginnings of French rule there, in 1830, had coincided with a domestic half-revolution).

The chief beneficiary of Gaullism was generally the bourgeoisie. This expression covered much more than its nearest equivalent, ‘middle class’, could possibly do in English. It had been the dominant class of the earlier Third Republic, had supplanted the aristocracy, and had been more different from it than had the English middle classes. Alain Besançon’s
Une génération
manages to paint that world in brief sketches: there is a great deal of property, with a very large private house in Paris, grandmothers in grand flats, on the rue du Faubourg-Saint-Honoré and the boulevard de La-Tour-Maubourg, driven in a Hispano-Suiza; and there are two country properties, one with hundreds of acres of grounds, well laid out by devoted gardeners. There is a whole
familia
of servants; and young Besançon gets to know the endless varieties of pears (Williams,
beurres Hardy
,
beurres Lebrun
, the
doyennes du Comice
, etc.). As he says, though he is not quite clear what ‘bourgeoisie’ means, it is simply not present in any literature other than French. He describes it as a matter of language and dress; it was a matter of family, too, the aristocracy being much more distant with each other. It was also a happy business, with much to do. Richard Cobb remembers the same phenomenon though he encountered it in a different form. He was sent at fifteen in the mid-thirties to a family that looked after him devotedly, and fell in love with France; then, after the war, he fell in with two eccentric brothers bizarrely occupying a house near the Lycée Saint-Louis (‘grimmest of Paris schools’). Bourgeois France went through a bad time: the killing fields of 1914, the interwar Depression (which gave France negative growth rates longer than in any other major country), and then the years of Occupation and Vichy, which led almost to its collapse. Besançon remembered the period of the fifties as ‘sale et pauvre’; the house yards uneven, plaster falling off, the porters’ kitchen foul-smelling, of cabbage and urine; 40-watt bulbs were used in the cafés, hanging from a wire, and their lavatories were of the Turkish type, with thick newspaper on a string; even the coffee was muddy and the wine was vinegary. It had been the end of a period of disaster when the bourgeois certainties had gone by the board. But with de Gaulle these returned in a peculiar way: there was a distinct bourgeois revival, partly based on glossy state institutions, and partly on the newly successful world-class economic activities. The new Citroën DS, majestically inflating as it was started up, was as much a symbol of sixties Paris as had been the canvas-and-tin
deux chevaux
of the fifties.

Now that de Gaulle had united the historically divided Right enough to establish a durable government, quite soon France was going to overtake England, for the first time since the French Revolution itself. Charles de Gaulle was truly the man of the decade. As he said in his memoirs, in one of the great first lines of literature, all his life he had had a certain idea of France, and now, in his late sixties, he would restore her greatness. He had gone through the First World War, had been wounded and taken prisoner, had lived through the humiliations of the thirties, when Paris became, in George Orwell’s words, half brothel, half museum. Then had come defeat in 1940, and the German occupation. De Gaulle, going to London with a few companions, had kept the idea of France going, and had become in 1944 the man of the hour. He had repeated the feat in 1958, and, by 1962, a great man known around the globe, he would give France the self-confidence and influence which in his opinion his country deserved. This was very far from being fanciful. France was one of very few European countries from which people did not emigrate: quite the contrary, many foreigners wanted to move there, whether Italians and Spaniards in search of employment, or Englishmen anxious to escape from the taxes and the weather and the babyish restrictions back home. Literature, film, wine, history - everything spoke for France. There had been one long-term problem, again a uniquely French experience, in that her people since the great Revolution had made fewer and fewer babies. In the seventeenth century there had been more Frenchmen than Russians, but by 1914 there were almost five times as many Russians (or subjects of the Tsar). Why, is a good question: the answer is probably to be found in the French Revolution, which gave land to the peasant, and the
Code Napoléon
which forcibly divided inheritances among children. There was enough to keep one child, and the size of the farm meant that only one extra pair of hands was needed, while only one extra mouth could be fed. In the slump of the thirties, as everywhere else, parents stopped producing babies, and the French population hardly went up, except through immigration, after 1870. The war, and the Occupation, changed this, for mysterious reasons: in 1949 there were almost a million births, one third more than in 1939, which was itself one of the better years for births, and by 1960 the young in France once more outnumbered the old. Families now produced three children, not one. De Gaulle, though himself elderly, spoke for a new generation, and French self-confidence began to recover.

De Gaulle’s prestige ran very high because, since 1958, France had flourished, and this was shown in the very considerable power of his new presidential office. In the summer, there had been consultation over a new constitution, which was supposed to do away with the political swings-and-roundabouts of the Third and Fourth Republics. Then, because the politicians did not want an authoritarian figure as head of state, the presidency was a mainly ceremonial office. Now, the president had much greater power (the historian Jean Lacouture remarked that the executive had such power that ‘this republic’ tends to be ‘on the frontiers of the democratic world’). The prime minister in the Matignon Palace also had power, though less of it, and there was a potential for conflict, but in 1958 this did not matter. De Gaulle had the constitution approved by an enormous majority with a referendum. On 21 December 1958 he got nearly 80 per cent of the vote, as president. On the whole he chose resistance men for his team, and Georges Pompidou, though now at the Rothschild Bank, was marked with great favour as he did as he was told.

Once in office, de Gaulle ran affairs in grand style (he once terminated an interview when the woman journalist crossed her legs), though often with a human touch, like a good commander-in-chief keeping up with his men. He also disciplined his time: curiously enough he used to read
Le Monde
cover to cover, though he did not regard it as ‘national’ and generally disliked the press. He loved the James Bond films and television in the evening but also kept up with his reading, always punctiliously thanking in his own hand authors who sent their books. Someone said of him that in moments of idleness he was like a Henry Moore statue. Twice a year was the press conference, when de Gaulle would speak for up to one and a half hours, very well-rehearsed beforehand, and exhausting, like a theatrical performance or, as his press secretary said, like a woman giving birth. On television he had ‘the eyes of an elephant’ and a face like Rodin’s Balzac. His courage was not in dispute, and at Kennedy’s funeral he behaved characteristically - waving aside the insistent offer of an armour-plated limousine so that he could walk at the side of Kennedy’s widow and son, when other statesmen behaved with self-preserving prudence. At any rate, an indisputable charisma.

He himself was such a figure as to conceal the possible problems - that power would be transferred from a fractious and difficult assembly to a presidential court, far less visible from the outside, and therefore likely to be very corrupt; and there was a further problem that, without formal opposition, informal opposition in the streets would grow - as was to happen, within a few years. But de Gaulle himself was utterly incorruptible (in the fifties his wife had discreetly made ends meet by selling heirloom silver as she otherwise had to make do on a colonel’s pension). A. J. P. Taylor rightly noted that only one man in French politics had emerged from office significantly poorer, de Gaulle, and one man in English politics significantly richer, Lloyd George (since then, Blair has joined the little list). Even then there were complaints that the State dominated the media, especially television, and at one ceremony foreign journalists - hated figures, given the Algerian problem - were kicked and manhandled. In the event, even Communists voted ‘yes’: the total ‘no’ vote being a million short of their own 5,500,000 in the elections. There followed the lengthy effort at peace in Algeria together with self-assertion in matters European, and this marked the whole presidency.

The November elections of 1958 proceeded in a two-stage form that greatly damaged the Left - though even now a problem emerged, that there were two conservative or right-of-centre parties, de Gaulle’s UNR with almost 200 seats, and a second group with 132. They had won under two fifths of the vote, but had two thirds of the new assembly, and were therefore not forced into unity of action. In time, this was to become a problem. The French Right was given to splitting, as some would-be stalwart, feeling slighted, would round up the out-ins against the loyalists, and even launch a new party which, by making a nuisance of itself, could menace the government’s existence. Such was the basis of the career of Valéry Giscard d’Estaing and of several others since. However, de Gaulle commanded by his presence, and there was also a distinct strategy: in effect, the old
résistants
stepped into the shoes of the unlovely Vichy technocrats. The first prime minister, Michel Debré, was an old
résistant
who in the end could not follow de Gaulle’s policy in Algeria, but who loyally carried through the first measures. It had been obvious since 1945 that inflation and protectionism went together with institutional trade union power, itself heavily under Communist influence, and the new government, installed in the summer of 1958, had a priority to change matters radically. Georges Pompidou, who had started life as a French teacher, had moved into banking and was now Debré’s chief of staff, had as much in mind, and the new finance minister was the rigid Antoine Pinay (de Gaulle did not much care for him but he did have the confidence of the financial world). His chief idea was to make the franc stable, and to dismantle the protectionism that allowed such inefficiency in French industry.

De Gaulle had little time for economics, and saw it in terms of national confidence. Pinay was dry and prudent (he even objected to the plan being launched in his name, but was overruled by the General); the real architect of the reform was the perennially right-but-repulsive Jacques Rueff, and his priority was to stop inflation. An immediate loan was launched, successfully, and a team of experts set about the problem of the franc, recognizing that no country with self-respect could tolerate more than two zeroes on the notes. But that meant far deeper changes: the Bank of France (and the nationalized banks in general) must not go on giving preferential medium-term credit at low interest rates for industry and housing; the Treasury should just take money from the market, now that one existed. The Rueff reform took a line in financial stabilization that has been familiar since 1923, when Dr Hjalmar Schacht took it in Germany; budget decreases, tax increases, a liberalization of foreign trade and a devaluation of 15.45 per cent. It is political arithmetic, dressed up, and is currently called the ‘Washington consensus’. But the whole was accompanied by a measure that caught the world’s attention - introduction of the ‘heavy franc’, at 100 to one. Now, with a money that could be converted at will, producers were to be stimulated by competition, and this indeed was to happen: France created some world-class industrial concerns in a short time. The five socialists wanted to resign, but de Gaulle browbeat Guy Mollet into staying on patriotic grounds. The General was by now a master of television performance: he understood that ham acting was his stockin-trade but he ‘sold’ the plans: without them, he said, ‘we would remain a backward country, perpetually between crisis and second-rateness’.