Pétain, the man who must be loathed

From "Destin Français" by Eric Zemmour

They liked each other so much. So much alike. Admired each other. Supported each other. Understood each other. They were the general and his aide-de-camp, the author and his 'negro', the master and his disciple. They contemplated each other as if in a mirror. Just as self-aware, just as proud, just as independent, just as hated by their superiors and peers, just as ironic, just as insolent, just as arrogant. The same superbness, the same contempt, the same cynicism. The same insensitivity.

Pétain remained a colonel for many years, because he was the only advocate of defensive strategy, while the doxa of the general staff favored the offensive. De Gaulle remained a colonel for many years, because he was the only advocate of the offensive, while the doxa of the general staff was in favor of defensive strategy. It was the war of 1914 that vindicated Pétain and covered him with glory. It was the war of 1940 that vindicated de Gaulle and covered him with glory.

They had lunch together, they worked together, they talked together. The old looked at the young with the infinite tenderness one has for a son one never had. The young man looked at the old man with the tender respect one has for a father, a hero. Philippe took Charles to visit the battlefield of Verdun, where he had acquired immortal glory. Charles dreamed of doing his country a similar service. Contrary to legend, Philippe was not the godfather of Charles's son, but the latter was nevertheless named Philippe and had an autographed photo of the great man. Charles wrote, Philippe corrected; he crossed out, annotated, deleted superfluous adjectives and adverbs. Charles couldn't stand anyone touching his talented prose, imitating Chateaubriand; he argued, protested, negotiated, foot to foot. Philippe called Charles "the most intelligent officer in the French army". For Charles, Philippe was the embodiment of the ideal leader he had outlined in his early books. It is said that Philippe intervened to get the jury at the Saint-Cyr Military School to raise his young protégé's grade. He imposed him as a lecturer at the same school. The young de Gaulle often recalled that he was from 'Pétain's entourage.'

When de Gaulle was sentenced to death in absentia on August 2, 1940, Pétain wrote by hand in the margin of the court ruling: “It is obvious that this judgment in absentia can only be a judgment in principle. It has never occurred to me to follow it up.” At the Liberation, De Gaulle commuted Marshal Pétain's death sentence to life imprisonment at Fort du Portalet, then in a cell on the Ile d'Yeu. In his Mémoires, he would reproach the men of the Fourth Republic for having cruelly prolonged the old soldier's detention.

Their initial quarrel is a classic of the Republic of Letters. A master builder who uses several 'negroes'; the neglected 'negro' who rebels; a dispute over authorship: who owns the work? The tone rises, the words sharpen like rapiers. De Gaulle by Pétain: "An ambitious, uneducated man"; "a proud, ungrateful, embittered man". Pétain by de Gaulle: "Old age is a shipwreck"; "Marshal Pétain was a very great man who died in 1925 unbeknownst to those who were not part of his entourage."
The two men would cross paths for the last time in 1940. On June 11, at the Château de Briare, de Gaulle had just been promoted to general: "You're a general!" said Pétain. I don't congratulate you. What good are ranks in defeat? On June 14, at the Splendid Hotel in Bordeaux, Pétain has lunch at a table a little further away. De Gaulle rose to greet him in silence: “He shook my hand, without a word. I was never to see him again.”

On June 16, de Gaulle returned to Bordeaux from London. As soon as he landed at Mérignac airport, he learned that Paul Reynaud had resigned and was to be replaced by Marshal Pétain. He arrived just as Paul Baudouin was leaving Pétain's office, holding the government list in his hand. Baudouin confided to Pierre Ordioni: "General de Gaulle came out of the shadows and asked me if he was in the government... I knew full well he wasn't, but to save time, I pretended to consult my paper, which he came over my shoulder to read... No sooner had he finished going through it than he whispered, still over my shoulder: "I know what I have to do." And without even taking leave of me, he left¹.

When he became head of state, Pétain was the last of the living giants of 1914: Clemenceau, Foch, Joffre, Ludendorff and Hindenburg were dead. When Marshal Franchet d'Espèrey died in 1942, Pétain said: "From now on, I will no longer be called Marshal Pétain, but the Marshal.” By the 1960s, De Gaulle would be the last of the giants of 1940, after the demise of Churchill, Stalin and Roosevelt. Pétain attained supreme power at the age of 84, and had eleven years to live until his death on July 23, 1951. De Gaulle returned to power at the age of 68, with little more than eleven years to live. Their two late fates prove, if proof were needed, that old age increases ambition rather than calms it. Both men contemplate their contemporaries with a mixture of morgue and irony, pride and courtesy. “He's the world's greatest actor, his taste for the right terms, his contemptuous clairvoyance towards people, his pride strong enough to warn him more often than not against the temptations of vanity, his astonishing capacity for silence, patience and dissimulation. And age had further increased his appetite for power... “ Emmanuel Berl's portrait of Pétain could have been that of General de Gaulle.

PETAIN AND DE GAULLE ARE FROM THE SAME FAMILY, THE MOST FRENCH OF THE FRENCH

Pétain sincerely believed that he had "made to France the gift of his person". De Gaulle “identified with France insofar as he considered himself to be, of France, the ultimate and only chance².” Today's historians do not like the idea of their closeness, let alone the complicity between the two men. They're right, but we need to go further: they're from the same family. In his novel Chronique du règne de Charles IX, Mérimée imagined two brothers from a Protestant family, one of whom converts to Catholicism during the Wars of Religion. They would tear each other apart, and clash to the death. De Gaulle and Pétain are these enemy brothers, caught up in an inexpiable quarrel that goes beyond them.

Pétain was a peasant from Artois; de Gaulle, a squire from the North. They are both rooted in the land of France. They are the most French of the French. They are both Catholics, although Pétain's faith is less profound. They were not of the same generation, but both were scarred by the defeat of 1870 and thirsty for revenge. They were neither Germanophobes nor Anglophobes, but neither Germanophiles nor Anglophiles. Pétain's military doctrine is to have none at all; de Gaulle theorizes the refusal of any theory; they both imitate Napoleon and “his art of war all in the execution.” Pétain was an adept of defensive strategy, but, from the end of the First World War, he extolled the major role of aircraft and their bombardments, to “demoralize enemy troops on the ground and prevent any concentration of forces with the enemy.” De Gaulle advocated the armored offensive, but wrote articles in the 1920s on the importance of fortifications and the continuous front.

Pétain was the figure of the heroic Verdun generation, who despised the grotesque defeated of the "debacle", fleeing in disorder from the advancing Germans. A few years after the end of the war, de Gaulle exclaimed to Claude Guy: “In 1940, it was the first time we were beaten in shame! That's right, beaten in shame! We'd certainly been beaten before, but not in shame! In 1940, for the first time, we acted as if we were no longer a great power. That's the origin of the moral and mental drama we're going through today. What's more, having been beaten into submission, we're all aware that we've come to terms with this shame. And that's what's so serious. This is why hope will not be so easily reborn in us³.”

Both Pétain and de Gaulle inscribed their actions in a providential logic. Both men made the French feel guilty: Pétain for the hedonism of the Front Populaire and the “lies that did us so much harm”; de Gaulle for not joining him en masse in London or in the Resistance. François Mauriac wrote in 1946: “The French, whose essential fault, whose only fault, was to despair of France at the time of its greatest abasement, and through words spread everywhere, to overwhelm their humiliated mother, are judged, whether they like it or not, by this solitary leader sitting on the sidelines and who is no longer anything in the State... these four years continue to judge us. We struggle in vain: we all now have a mark, a sign, on our foreheads, which fate has given us, which no complacency will erase, and which we will carry with us into death.”

A NEW THIRTY YEARS’ WAR

In 1938, Pétain said: “The French haven't suffered enough.” De Gaulle said in 1956: “The French don't know what misfortune is. They must experience disaster and personal suffering.” Pétain and de Gaulle were 19th-century men, patriots, anti-modernists: they believed in the primacy of states and nations over ideologies. Marshal Pétain is always criticized for not first seeing in Hitler's brown uniform the Nazi ideology behind German nationalism. But what did General de Gaulle see under Joseph Stalin's red jacket, if not the Russian nation “which will absorb communism like blotting paper drinks ink”?

Pétain and de Gaulle were Machiavellian realists who knew only the National Interest, which prevented them from being seduced by the ideological myths that ran rampant during the war - all those Internationals, whether fascist, communist or liberal, which were in reality no more than the trappings of national hegemony, whether German, Russian or American. We rightly praise the General's perspicacity, as he quickly understood that 1940 was merely a continuation of 1914, within the framework of a new Thirty Years' War. But it was for the same reason that the Marshal asked the Germans for an armistice. An armistice is a truce, which does not put an end to the state of war. An armistice is not a surrender. It does not hand the vanquished over to the victor. It gives him a respite. On December 12, 1941, de Gaulle confided to General Odic: “Never admit that the armistice could not be avoided.”

One memory haunts Pétain's mind: Germany in 1918, and the November 11th armistice. Defeated and stripped of part of its territory, Germany was able to rebuild and prepare for revenge. Pétain took his cue from Stresemann, the German chancellor of the 1920s, whose motto was to “finesse” with his victors. In Pétain's eyes, France had saved the essentials, like Germany at the time: its state, its territory (at least, part of it), an army, albeit limited to a hundred thousand men (the same number as the German army in 1919!).
The worst had been avoided: France had not been wiped off the map. On his bedside table, Pétain has a book on Prussia in 1806, after Napoleon's dazzling victory at Jena, which so closely resembles that of the Germans in 1940. At that time, Napoleon had stripped his vanquished of half its territory, but made the mistake of not decapitating the Hohenzollern dynasty. Remarkable ministers Stein and Hardenberg had rebuilt Prussia's power by imitating Napoleonic France in every respect - the army, the administration, the civil code. Seven years after the rout of Jena, the Prussians took their revenge in Leipzig, with their Russian and Austrian “allies”. In Vichy, we read and reread the history of Prussia after Jena.

For the defeated French, the question is not: should we imitate our victor? But: how far should we go? Forge a single party? A totalitarian regime? A discriminatory status for Jews? What gave the Germans victory? What should France take up to prepare its revenge and turn its own weapons against its victor?

Back in 1870, Ernest Renan explained that France's “intellectual and moral reform” would have to be carried out in the Prussian school. In a few years' time, after the American victory of 1945, the same reasoning will apply: we must imitate the victor again and again, but this time, we must make the strong points of American power our own: industry, enterprise, consumerism, culture, law, freedom...

SENDING ENGLISH AND GERMANS THEIR SEPARATE WAYS

Pétain was born in 1856. For him, all this history is not a distant past, but a still relevant present, like childhood memories. It was Laval, with all his roughneck loquaciousness and conviction that he would “possess anyone”, who expressed this strategy most presumptuously, when he said to Pétain: “In 1918, Monsieur le maréchal, you won the war, France, around the green carpet, lost the peace. In 1940, we just lost the war, but this time we'll win the peace.” Pétain and, even more so, Laval failed to appreciate the difference between the two situations. The defeated Germany of 1919 was protected by British and American allies. The Prussia of 1806 was not torn apart by a 20th-century totalitarian tyrant. Paul Reynaud warned Marshal Pétain: “You think Hitler is like William II. You're mistaken. Hitler is Genghis Khan.” But the French armistice is just one element in a strategic poker game where all the players are bluffing. After the Munich Conference in 1938, the Western powers had wanted to divert German aggression towards the Russian bear; by signing the surprise German-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact in August 1939, Stalin had pulled off a master stroke: “to send Germany into the paws of the 'imperialist' powers’.” So it was France that suffered the first shock. Its Maginot Line was less watertight than the English Channel, the Russian steppes or the American Atlantic. It’s all in geography!

As it emerges from the war, France is sending the German boomerang back to the British and Russians. For all those - and there are many on the right, but also on the left - who have not forgotten what France's allegiance to the “English gouvernante” during the inter-war years had cost our country, it was an explosion of joy: “I was exultant. It was splendid. I could see the rage of the English, to whom the docile slave was finally breaking company, refusing to let herself bleed to death to prolong the tyrant's agony a little longer. I was moved to tears with enthusiasm and tenderness for the old chief who had just succeeded in this ‘unhooking.’ Through his grandfatherly voice, France was, for the first time in so many years, showing its national sovereignty. What we had been forbidden to do during eons of prosperity, defeat now allowed us to do. All was not lost. After such words, the atrocious Marseillaise of Reynaud's speeches became France's anthem once again."⁴

For Pétain, as for many Frenchmen, England would deal with Hitler, since it had not stopped negotiating with Germany at our expense since 1919. Hitler didn't think otherwise. On June 22, 1940, and again on July 21, he proposed opening negotiations with England. The French Empire could even be an object of exchange, and Hitler was quite prepared to hand it over to England. This is one of the main reasons why Hitler accepted the armistice requested by the French. It was the dream of an Ausgleich (an “arrangement”) between the “German race” and the “English race” that haunted Hitler throughout the summer of 1940, and was perhaps at the root of his final defeat: “Unlike the months preceding the invasion of France, this time the soldiers felt in front of them an indecisive, hesitant man, who still believed in an arrangement with England and didn't want to spoil anything⁵.”

A year later, when Hitler had realized that Churchill was decidedly not of the same calibre as the rest of the British aristocracy, he would rush off to Africa in pursuit of the indispensable oil fields. Too late. By dithering in the summer of 1940, he had squandered the benefits of his victory over France. By May 1941, Pétain had understood: "Hitler is running from victory to victory after victory.” When Hitler embarked on his Russian campaign in June 1941, the old marshal returned to the fundamentals of the First World War, the war on two fronts, west and east, which had lost Germany and would once again prove to be its undoing. What de Gaulle had so brilliantly foreseen a year earlier.
Pétain returned to his Verdun analysis: fire kills. French blood must be spared. In 1789, France was as populous as England, Germany and Italy combined. In 1940, the forty million French were only half the size of the eighty million Germans. In six weeks, the May-June campaign killed ninety thousand Frenchmen. The hecatomb was worthy of the worst hours of the First World War. France could no longer withstand such bloodletting, on pain of disappearing. This is what gave the armistice quarrels their tragic character. The “réduit breton”, where some thought the fighting would continue, would have been swept away by the formidable German machine, with no rivals in the world at the time. It would have been possible to continue the war from the Empire, but this would have meant handing over the entire French population to the German yoke.

France, under the control of a Gauleiter and the SS, was “polandized,” as Pétain himself put it at the time. The fate of Poland, or Ireland, those martyred nations that had disappeared for centuries from the map of Europe, haunted the minds of the French elite, who had seen the “best army in the world” crumble in a matter of weeks. This is why Pétain refused to declare war on England, even after Mers el-Kébir, just as he refused to declare war on Germany in November 1942. This “wait-and-see attitude” had already been criticized by Foch and Mangin in 1916!

VICCHYSO-RESISTANTS

As soon as the armistice was signed, weapons were camouflaged. The Marshal encouraged and financed from his personal coffers the Hector network, the first military intelligence network, founded by Colonel Heurtaux. When de Gaulle sent his first three emissaries, Rémy, Fourcaud and Duclos, to France in 1940, they were hosted by people close to the Marshal, such as Gabriel Jeantet. De Gaulle admitted in his Mémoires de guerre that the first acts of resistance, as early as the summer of 1940, were carried out by the secret services and the Vichy army. But he was careful not to specify that it was with Pétain's approval. Understandably, the Vichy men were also hunting down Gaullists. Nevertheless, between July 1940 and November 1942, 1,300 Axis agents were arrested by Vichy services in the Free Zone and North Africa. Forty-two were shot, and four hundred and eighty-three sentenced to hard labor in Algeria.

For his part, Weygand, in agreement with Pétain, reconstituted the African Army clandestinely. This Army of Africa resumed the war in Tunisia against the Axis on November 20, 1942, under the command of Generals Giraud, Juin and Barré. On November 8, 1942, Anglo-American forces landed in North Africa. Marshal Pétain ordered the French forces to resist; forty-eight hours later, Admiral Darlan ordered a ceasefire, and it was learned after the war that a secret telegram from the Marshal had authorized him to take whatever decisions he deemed necessary.

On General Weygand's 90th birthday, on January 19 1957, Marshal Juin made a solemn speech: “When I took up this post, I inherited the instructions you had given. These instructions were admirable, there was nothing to take away from them, and I was careful not to change anything during my entire command. I also inherited the tool you had forged in one year, that admirable tool you bequeathed to me and which I then led to victory in Tunisia, then in Italy! It was incomparable.” Paradoxically, the Free French troops will never be as imposing and decisive as those of Weygand's army. There were four hundred men at Koufra, three thousand three hundred at Bir Hakeim...
This was because the balance of power between de Gaulle and Pétain was initially unbalanced. Pétain applied the traditional rules of European law of nations: one state, one territory, one army. Everything else is an illusion. Everything else is a chimera. Everything else is romanticism. Paul Reynaud, de Gaulle's trusted advisor at the time, thought no differently; on June 15, 1940, he declared: "The departure of the government [from France] would be considered by the people as a desertion."

CIVIC HONOR AND MILITARY HONOR

De Gaulle had the prescience to see that another role was possible, and even indispensable: the hero who does not give up the fight and does not lay down the sword of France; the government in exile that maintains contacts with our allies: “There must be an ideal. There has to be hope. Somewhere, the flame of French resistance must burn brightly.” As Robert Aron so aptly put it in his seminal Histoire de Vichy - a remarkable work published in 1954 and now wrongly denigrated by the academic doxa entirely converted to the work of Robert Paxton: “The clash of two conceptions of honor, both of which were necessary for France. Pétain's civic honor, protecting the population, and De Gaulle's military honor, refusing to admit defeat.”
François Mauriac would later write in his notebook: “I was thinking last night that one could explain two destinies: that of Marshal Pétain and that of General de Gaulle, by saying that one preferred the French to France and the other France to the French.” The Vichyists plead the services rendered to the population and the reforms undertaken for the good of the country. The Gaullists retort that you can't reform the country under the eye of the occupier. But in 1814, 1870 and 1914-1918, France was also occupied. Even in 1944, there were foreign troops on French soil, the American military administration, AMGOT, was ready to run France, and no one was unaware that General de Gaulle's superbly literary fiction of "Paris liberated by itself" was nothing more than a historical myth, designed to fend off American pretensions. Pétain was dependent on the Germans, on their demands, always haughty, often criminal. When Pétain spoke on the radio of his “semi-liberty”, his Minister of Justice, Joseph Barthélemy, commented snidely: “He was bragging.” But de Gaulle was also dependent on the British and Americans, and they sometimes kept a tight rein on him when they cut off fuel supplies to halt the advance of his troops. Similarly, during the inter-war years, Republican governments had been closely subservient to the “English gouvernante”, to the detriment of France's interests. Not to mention the communists, resistance fighters and patriots, but only when Moscow decided it.

We are all familiar with the Homeric quarrels between Churchill and de Gaulle, which the Englishman recounts in his Memoirs: “Mon général, if you get in my way, I will liquidate you!” Less well known are the equally harsh clashes between Pétain and the Germans, as in this interview with Marshal Goering at Saint-Florentin on December 1, 1941: “I understood that collaboration implied dealing as equals. If there is a victor and a vanquished below, there is no longer collaboration, there is what you call a diktat and what we call might makes right.
—For crying out loud, Mr. Marshal, who are the victors, you or us?"

German soldiers noted in a report dated June 20, 1941: “Collaborationist phraseology is only used to camouflage the wait-and-see attitude of the Vichy authorities.”

AS IF WE HAD BEEN IN 1815

Both Pétain and de Gaulle played a double game. This is not so much the consequence of their choice or temperament as of their weakness. On the very day of the Montoire meeting between Hitler and Pétain on October 24, 1940, Professor Rougier, a friend of the Marshal's, spoke to Churchill on his behalf, giving the latter “the assurance that France would never undertake anything incompatible with honor against her former ally”. On December 4, 1940, Jacques Chevalier, Secretary of State for Public Instruction, received a visit from Pierre Dupuy, Minister of Canada, bearing a message from Lord Halifax, British Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs: “Tell our French friends that we are in an extremely delicate situation. We cannot jump at each other's necks. We must maintain a state of artificial tension between them and ourselves... But behind a facade of misunderstanding, we must get along.” Pétain had the words “artificial tension” replaced by “artificial coldness”. And on February 1, 1941, he confided to the same Chevalier: “I am loyal and friendly to the English because, within the limits of the field left to me - which is not very large - I am doing everything in my power to prepare for their victory, which will be ours.”

Pétain kept two unique papers in his safe: one was the Montoire minutes, the other the Rougier protocol. And Robert Aron adds: “For Pétain, the commitments made to the British were more substantial than those formulated at Montoire.” But it is Montoire, and the handshake with Hitler, that will remain. In memories, in minds and in history. Pétain was to experience the tragedy of what Blaise Pascal called the “clumsiness of the half-skilled”. French public opinion was only aware of the images and declarations in favor of collaboration with Germany. It knows nothing of the negotiations, the procrastinations, the rebuffs, the dissimulations, the double, triple and quadruple plays. It takes at face value what it sees and hears.And even those who were most sympathetic to the Maréchal ended up rejecting this regime, which seemed to be betraying the fatherland when it was supposed to be defending it.

Paul Marion, General Secretary for Information at the time, would later make his mea culpa: “We acted before the Germans as if we'd been in 1870 or 1815, at a time when the great human masses, when men were not yet citizens. We believed we could make policy in the secrecy of political chambers and staffs, when there was radio, when there was propaganda, when entire peoples were passionate about politics. We believed that we could resist the Germans, deceive them and protect our country under conditions that were not the conditions of the modern world.”

De Gaulle, on the other hand, was both an ally and a slave to the Anglo-Saxons. He did everything in his power to break away from their grip by drawing closer to the Soviets. In May 1942, in London, during a violent altercation with the American envoys whom de Gaulle called “cons et de ganache”, he told them the essence of his thinking: “The Soviets are the only ones who understand! It is with them that I will rebuild France and Europe.” He will rebuild France, but with the American Marshall Plan.

In Paris, the sharpest critics of the Marshal's “wait-and-see” policy were to be found in the ranks of the French collaborators, who criticized him for “taking his orders from the Americans”, during his frequent meetings with the American ambassador to Vichy, Admiral Leahy. In his book Aimer de Gaulle, written at the end of the war, Claude Mauriac recounts this edifying scene: “One of Bidault's first sentences, before we sat down to dinner, came back to my mind and enlightened me: ‘There are two things that exasperate de Gaulle, two things he can't stand: the Allies and the Resistance...’” The Allies and the Resistance were suspicious of De Gaulle, and saw him as a potential dictator. A new Pétain. A new Bonaparte. One of those military men with a thirst for personal power and nothing but contempt for the Republic. They're not entirely wrong. Once again, if Pétain and de Gaulle are republicans, it's with many ulterior motives and mental restrictions.
Pétain, like his Great War colleagues Foch, Joffre and Lyautey, never liked the Republic, even though he served it loyally. In his captivity notebooks, former French Prime Minister Édouard Herriot, imprisoned in Germany with Blum and Daladier, recounts a conversation he had with the general's sister, Marie-Agnès Caillau, on April 24, 1945, when she too was imprisoned: “Very frank, intelligent and kind [she] told us that Charles was a monarchist, that he defended Maurras against his brother Pierre to the point of tears in one discussion…”

Both Pétain and de Gaulle are above all soldiers; and the army, since the advent of the Third Republic, had been the refuge of Catholics and monarchists who want to serve France, but feel like a foreign body in the secular republic; live as if in a besieged citadel. In 1940, royalists were convinced that the Marshal was preparing the restoration of the monarchy. In 1958, the Count of Paris will be convinced that he has received assurances to this effect from General de Gaulle.

Historians today unanimously claim that Pétain killed the Republic, while de Gaulle re-established it. But it was the parliamentarians of a “popular front” majority who abolished the Third Republic, just as those of the “republican front”, elected in 1956, would bring down the Fourth. When General de Gaulle obtained full constituent powers on June 3, 1958, the analogy with July 10, 1940 was obvious to everyone. “What was striking in Parliament,” noted the Socialist Félix Gouin, “was a state of mind comparable to that which had arisen in the Vichy hours of 1940. Fear is creeping into the minds of some colleagues.”

A PSYCHOLOGICAL COUP D’ETAT

The anxiety and anguish were even worse than in Vichy, since Pétain's rise to power had been the product of an external situation — military defeat — while behind de Gaulle, the soldiers of Operation Resurrection were threatening to land. The threat of a military putsch came from de Gaulle, not Pétain. “A successful February 6 [1934]”: this is how the great republican political scientist André Siegfried defined the transition from the Fourth to the Fifth Republic. He could have more aptly described it as an 18 Brumaire that didn't need the 19th, when Murat shouted to his hussars in front of frightened deputies: “Get this fucking rabble out of here!” A coup d'état that received a republican endorsement in extremis. A psychological coup. Or how to force President René Coty to call de Gaulle without firing a shot.

De Gaulle wanted no pronunciamento. He later confided to Jean-Raymond Tournoux⁶: “Obviously, in 1945, I could have called Leclerc and thrown the Assembly out! That can't lead to anything! You can't serve and espouse a popular movement!” But everything had to be done to bring him back to power. In those few days of May 1958, like crocuses in springtime, former secret service agents, former members of the Resistance and ex-servicemen appeared, scouring the capital and major cities, where the armies of mainland France were already ready to rally behind the white Gaullist plume. The military plan was precise, concise and effective. De Gaulle was informed hour by hour of what was being planned. As Jacques Soustelle, former head of the Gaullist secret services during the war, one of the main leaders, would say: “De Gaulle knew everything. We didn't ask him for instructions, since the aim of the whole operation was to get him appointed by the President of the Republic⁷.”

Debré, Foccart, Guichard, Chaban-Delmas, Soustelle, Delbecque, Neuwirth — the chain of plotters was active for all to see. In his book on Le Retour du Général de Gaulle, Georges Ayache, flabbergasted by such ostentatious cynicism, writes: “Never has a coup d'état against a legal regime been so transparently fomented.” He was wrong, and this was another point in common with the 18 brumaire 1799: everyone in Paris knew that Bonaparte was preparing a coup d'état! At his famous press conference on May 19, de Gaulle blessed all these maneuvers and plots: “The army deemed it its duty to prevent disorder from establishing itself. It did so, and well.” François Mitterrand, at the time the only opponent along with Pierre Mendès France, cried out in the wilderness: “De Gaulle once had two companions around him: Honor and the Fatherland. Today, these companions are called coup de force and sedition.” De Gaulle can gloat: “Bravo Delbecque, you played well... but you must admit that I played well too!” Great art. And luck. A lot of luck.

THE CONSTITUTION OF 1944 IS THE ELDER SISTER OF THAT OF 1958

De Gaulle had the good fortune to arrive after Pétain. Guy Mollet was a man of the Left who, unlike Laval, also knew how to manipulate his parliamentary colleagues, but without despising or hating them. De Gaulle skillfully made the gestures that Pétain had failed to make in his time, to mark his difference. He pledged to respect fundamental “republican principles”: universal suffrage, separation of powers, independence of the judiciary. Last but not least, he would submit his Constitution to a referendum, something Pétain had promised but never done. He was very wrong not to do so.
Not only would the 1944 Constitution - which the Maréchal wanted to bequeath to France, but which would never see the light of day — have been approved, but it also resembled the 1958 Constitution like an older sister: election of the President of the Republic by an enlarged college, greater power for the executive, the right of dissolution in the hands of the President, who appoints the Prime Minister, universal suffrage extended to women, and the creation of a genuine Supreme Court of Justice. Had the transformation of the Senate into an economic and social chamber and regionalization not been rejected by voters in 1969, de Gaulle would have celebrated — in his own way — a partial return to the corporations and provinces cherished by the Maréchal.
This was not as surprising as we might think today. Both Pétain and de Gaulle embodied the late entry into the Republic of those social classes — Catholics, officers, but also technocrats — who had long camped at the gates of the regime, and who had finally penetrated it, bringing their culture and values with them. Their entry was facilitated by the return of Alsace and Lorraine to the national fold. France, amputated of Strasbourg and Metz after 1871, was unbalanced. It was thanks to this amputation that Masonic radicalism had flourished in Toulouse and imposed the Third Republic throughout France. The arrival of the conservative, Catholic Eastern provinces from 1919 onwards would change the political face of France, undermining the foundations of the traditional Republic, undermining its geographical base, challenging its ideological underpinnings, and ultimately making Gaullism possible.

It was a fine piece of work. In the manner of brutal and cynical property developers, they kept the facade but completely refurbished the interior. The work took a long time - twenty years! - but the operation paid off handsomely, as it enabled France to adapt to the new times.

De Gaulle and Michel Debré, aided and abetted by the Socialist Guy Mollet, gutted parliamentary democracy, the only form of government worthy of the title “democracy” in the eyes of traditional “republicans”. This parliamentary Republic, which had turned into “absolute parliamentarism”, which the monarchists nicknamed “the Wretch”, this “democrastain” that they dreamed of destroying, was indeed completed by General de Gaulle, who stripped Parliament of most of its legislative power and transferred it to the executive, marginalizing the judiciary and establishing that “personal power” that haunted republicans since 1789 and the fall of the monarchy. The triumphant referendum of October 1958 was, of course, a resounding “yes” to de Gaulle, but above all it was a resounding “no” to the parliamentary democracy that the French had come to hate. But de Gaulle, unlike Pétain, carried out euthanasia under anaesthetic, with palliative care, without excessive pain, before promptly pulling the plug.

He will therefore be hailed as the restorer of the republic.

1. Pierre Ordioni, Tout commence à Alger, 40-44, Stock, 1972

2. Claude Mauriac, Un autre de Gaulle, Hachette, 1970

3. Clause Guy, En écoutant de Gaulle, Grasset, 1996

4. Lucien Rebatet, Les Décombres, Denoël, 1942

5. August Von Kageneck, La France occupée, Perrin, 2012

6. Jean-Raymond Tournoux, Secrets d’Etats, de Gaulle au pouvoir, Plon, 1960

7. Jacques Soustelle, Vingt-huit ans de gaullisme, La Table ronde, 1968