World: Battle for Survival

CHARLES DE GAULLE is no stranger to crisis and chaos. Other people's disorders have been his mandate for power, so much so that French Historian Herbert Luethy calls him "the politician of catastrophe." Seeing himself as the mystic, predestined savior of France, De Gaulle has twice ridden catastrophe into the Elysée Palace. He makes no secret of the fact that he regards his presence as France's head of state as the only real insurance against the basic inability of the French to govern themselves without lapsing into one of the frequent periods of violence that mark their history. "After me, the deluge," De Gaulle suggested to the French in one warning after another. Now, in spite of him, the deluge came. He could not blame it on the politicians of the past or on circumstances that were not of his making. This time the responsibility was his.

For ten years, the aspirations of France and the dictates of De Gaulle have appeared to be inseparable—a tribute to both his undeniable greatness and his penchant for saying it so often that people believed it. Last week the myth that France and De Gaulle are one lay shattered forever amid the garbage festering in the streets of Paris, the litter of uprooted paving stones, the splinters of chestnut trees hacked down to make barricades, the blood spilled on the capital's boulevards. France was a nation in angry rebellion —at times, it seemed, not far removed from civil war. It was a measure of De Gaulle's stature that he offered to submit his continued rule as President to the will of the French people. It was a measure of France's bitter new mood that this time he might be turned out.

Everywhere, France writhed in revolt and dishevelment. Half of the nation's 16 million workers were on strike, and most of the rest were idled by a massive transportation shutdown. The country's students barricaded themselves in their universities. Farmers defiantly parked their tractors across the nation's highways. Protesters surged through Paris streets by the thousands each night, battling police and riot troopers. With startling suddenness, the serenity of Gaullist France had been swept away in what the French are already calling "the Davs in May."

In France, as elsewhere, the explosion was detonated by the young, whose criticism of De Gaulle was untempered by any sense of debt. They did not know him as the leader of the Free French forces during World War II. Not many of them recalled the instability and economic weakness of the Fourth Republic that preceded De Gaulle's prosperous and stable Fifth. Instead, like the workers, who joined them soon enough, they had felt increasingly frustrated by a government on which normal public and political pressures had almost no effect. Underneath the obvious grievances, a spiritual antagonism had built up against De Gaulle during the long years of his autocracy (see box, p. 23).