After the war there was the general feeling that we must not have Continental wars every 20 years, especially between France and Germany. We felt we needed a general agreement among Europeans. That is how the idea came about of creating an organization that would make a new war impossible.

Foreign Minister Robert Schuman considered it indispensable that France and Germany work together. That was the impetus for the Schuman Plan, which was the beginning of European construction. When he returned to power, De Gaulle worked actively to bring about reconciliation with Germany. The Franco-German Treaty of 1963 was the symbolic incarnation of reconciliation and the desire for an entente between France and Germany. I was very much a partisan of this reconciliation.

But it was the cold war that was the defining phenomenon of the epoch. De Gaulle found it absurd. He sought to establish direct relations between France and the U.S.S.R. That led to his trip to Russia in 1966, where he was very well received. That trip changed things. From that point on,