1958
Charles de Gaulle
FROM THE TIME ARCHIVE
Jan. 5, 1959
Appearing and disappearing with bewildering rapidity, the scenes that
flashed across history's screen in 1958 often had the disjointed quality of a
surrealist movie. Some were dramatic portents of a world to come—missiles
trailing a fiery glow as they took off for deep space, bearing with them a
gadget that, when asked, sent back the recorded voice of the President of the
U.S., another that reported wondrously complicated readings on radiation far
beyond the atmosphere. Some reflected the temper of the times—a shock-haired
Texan receiving a Broadway ticker- tape welcome for winning a piano competition
in Moscow, a limber Australian methodically breaking records for the mile.
Still other scenes were charmingly sentimental—the heir to an ancient throne
promising himself in marriage to a commoner he first met on a tennis court, the
new, young head of a populous religious sect resuming his daily classes at
Harvard.
But as the show went on, great stretches of it proved to have a grim
sameness. Time after time the screen was filled with shots of rampaging mobs
with hate in their eyes, or of steel-helmeted troops fanning out through a
tense capital in the fateful hours before dawn. For 1958 was another year when
men from Caracas to Khartoum lost patience with the established order, a year
when nations abruptly smashed familiar institutions and sent their onetime
idols off to political oblivion—or violent death.
Few established leaders or governments emerged from this year of shattered
patterns with enhanced prestige. Nikita Khrushchev, 1957's Man of the Year, had
commanded the scientific resources to produce a Sputnik, but for all his
promises and boasts, he could not solve or begin to solve his country's
continuing agricultural crisis. In Red China, faced with his own agricultural
crisis, Mao Tse-tung launched 1958's most audacious political act, ordering his
650 million subjects into human anthills called "people's communes." But at
year's end he was compelled to retreat, not because of popular resentment
(which did not bother him), but because his scheme was not working at all well.
For the U.S. Government it was a year of holding operations. The economy
recovered its health; the vexed question of racial integration lay unsolved
beneath the surface, but did not erupt into violence. A nation's youth went
hula-hooping its uncomplicated way, and science, medicine and industry explored
new breakthroughs. But the stones cast at Richard Nixon in Latin America and
the Democratic sweep in the congressional elections made manifest a widespread
discontent with U.S. policy, foreign and domestic. To the credit of the
Eisenhower Administration was the fact that by firmness at Quemoy and the
prompt dispatch of marines and soldiers to Lebanon, it had prevented dramatic
deterioration of the international position of the U.S. And it was a U.S.
victory of sorts that Gamal Abdel Nasser, who began 1958 by triumphantly
merging Egypt and Syria into the United Arab Republic, found himself at year's
end at last aware that his Communist ally was a concealed enemy.
The statesmen who did have cause for self-satisfaction in 1958 were nearly
all new men—relative unknowns who had ridden a wave of discontent into power.
Most of them were generals—Lebanon's Chehab, Iraq's Kassem, Burma's Ne Win,
Pakistan's Ayub Khan, the Sudan's Abboud. And most seemed to have no program
beyond the military man's urge to tidy up the frequently corrupt, frequently
ineffectual parliamentary systems of young nations.
Few were the world's leaders able to turn to positive ends the explosive
desire for change that stalked the earth in 1958. One who did was himself among
the world's growing group of soldier-trained leaders. By putting his personal
mark on great events and proving once again the fundamental Christian
proposition that history is shaped by individuals, not by blind fate or
inexorable Marxist laws, France's Charles Andre Joseph Marie de Gaulle, 68,
made himself the Man of the Year.
Carrots & Cops. Eight months ago Charles de Gaulle, soldier, scholar
and writer, was a recluse, regarded by most of the world—when it thought of
him at all—as a man whose role in history had ended a dozen years earlier.
Today he is Premier and President-elect of France's Fifth Republic and
exercises more direct power over his country's affairs than any other
democratically chosen leader in the Western world. "His personal prestige,"
says a British expert on France, "is higher than that of any Frenchman since
Napoleon."
When De Gaulle emerged from the somnolent village of
Colombey-les-deux-Eglises last May, France was sliding hopelessly into civil
war. "The carrots are cooked, the carrots are cooked," blared Radio Algiers,
repeating with monotonous insistence the code phrase which signified that the
rebellious generals of Algeria were ready to land their paratroops in
Metropolitan France. In Paris white-faced ministers of the Fourth Republic
nervously deployed a small army of steel-helmeted cops, not sure of their
loyalty, and Interior Minister Jules Moch ordered coils of barbed wire laid out
on 15 of the 18 airfields surrounding Paris. Escorting a visitor out of his
office, ex-Premier Guy Mollet, onetime Socialist Resistance leader, soberly
remarked: "We may never see each other again. I am going to die on the
barricades."
Today, those three ominous weeks in May seem a world away; if they did not
justify the worst of fears, it was because all Frenchmen knew that they had a
man to fall back on. Charles de Gaulle, with the spontaneous support of his
countrymen, has restored the supremacy of internal law and given France a new
constitution that for the first time in 88 years endows the executive branch
with enough authority to pursue coherent policies. He has all but destroyed the
Communist Party as an active factor in French government, has laid the
groundwork for a fruitful new relationship between France and her onetime
African colonies, and has immensely strengthened France's moral and
psychological position in revolt-torn Algeria. Above all, he has given
Frenchmen back their pride, swept away the miasma of self- contempt that has
hung over France since its ignominious capitulation to Hitler in 1940.
Too Poor to Bow. In achieving all of this, De Gaulle has once again
confounded his critics. Few statesmen of his time have been so consistently
misunderstood. Joseph Stalin, in a moment of exceptional obtuseness, dismissed
him as "not complicated." Franklin Roosevelt shared the view of him held by
British Novelist H.G. Wells—"an utterly sincere megalomaniac." Others,
misjudging him in two directions, have called him everything from a
dictator-at-heart to an inept political thimblerigger.
The world at large first formed its impression of Charles de Gaulle in
World War II, and it was not an endearing one. As leader of Free France, he was
proud, touchy, intransigent. Winston Churchill felt that De Gaulle owed his
continued existence to the British, and should be grateful and compliant. All
parties concerned have since composed more graceful tribute to one another, but
in those tense days feelings ran high. To Franklin Roosevelt, De Gaulle was an
upstart playing Joan of Arc. "Yes," Churchill is reported to have rejoined,
"but my bloody bishops won't let me burn him."
Recalling those bitter days of uphill struggle, De Gaulle himself has
written: "I was starting from scratch. In France, no following and no
reputation. Abroad, neither credit nor standing. But this very destitution
showed me my line of conduct. It was by adopting without compromise the cause
of the national recovery that I could acquire authority. At this moment, the
worst in her history, it was for me to assume the burden of France." This
attitude "was to dictate my bearing and to impose upon my personality an
attitude I could never again change.
He refused himself the easier waiting role of a mere refugee movement in
London; he refused to enlist French soldiers into British units to "fight a war
no longer their own"; he "encased myself in ice" against those who opposed him.
"I am too poor to be able to bow," he once told Churchill. At first considered
an absurd figure, in the end he won grudging respect—and, more important, won
his point.
The widely held suspicion of De Gaulle, more prevalent outside France than
in, stems not from anything De Gaulle has done but from what he is. In an age
that makes a cult of ordinariness, he is a democrat but not an egalitarian. In
a world in which power suggests danger, he openly regards the wise exercise of
power as the supreme function of man. Where most mid-20th century statesmen
feel obliged to cloak their extraordinary qualities in a mantle of folksiness,
he unabashedly regards himself as a historic figure and comports himself as a
man of greatness.
The Old Soldier. At the somber, grey-walled Hotel Matignon, official
residence of France's Premiers, the Republican Guards now wear dress uniform
(white gloves, red epaulets) every day, and treat visitors with a new
formality. Senior government officials no longer wander in whenever they feel
like an informal chat, nor do they ring up the Premier on a direct line. De
Gaulle, who regards the telephone as an intolerable impediment to
concentration, has had the only one in his office disconnected.
Like the old soldier he is, De Gaulle has imposed a brisk routine on
himself as well as on his subordinates. Arising punctually at 7:30, he
breakfasts on coffee then plunges into a detailed summary of the French and
foreign press. At 9 he enters his office (which is decorated with busts of
Caesar and Nero) for a conference with his personal staff, headed by
47-year-old Georges Pompidou, onetime executive of the Rothschild bank. The day
planned, De Gaulle spends from two to three hours receiving visitors. Contrary
to their original expectations, De Gaulle treats his own Cabinet ministers with
old-fashioned courtesy, listens carefully and takes notes, but makes his own
final decisions.
After lunch (1 to 2:30) De Gaulle returns to his office, does paperwork
steadily until 8, then adjourns for dinner and a quiet evening with his wife.
Determined to avoid the nervous strain that wore 25 lbs. off one of his
predecessors, he makes it a rule that he is not to be disturbed in the evening
except for a grave emergency. So far there has been no emergency his staff
considered that grave.
"Why Doesn't He Laugh?" For all his military briskness, De Gaulle in
private life is a fond family man. Particularly devoted to his daughter Anne
(who was born sickly and died in 1948), he and Madame de Gaulle have founded in
her memory an institution for retarded children. At the 14-room house in
Colombey, where he still spends his weekends, he loves to play the patriarch of
the clan, gathering about him his naval officer son Philippe, his daughter
Elizabeth (married to an army officer) his three grandchildren, and as many as
possible of his 17 nieces and nephews and innumerable grandnieces and
grandnephews. To the children, he is benign, loving "Uncle Charles."
When he chooses to exercise it, De Gaulle is capable of an unexpected
humor. In his teens he was famed for his rendition of the "nose" speech from
Cyrano de Bergerac—an act that involved masterful use of his own huge nose.
And at his infrequent press conferences, he has employed his long, basset-hound
countenance to immensely comic effect.
His wit is apt to be savagely ironic. When one of his aides, exasperated
by a piece of correspondence, impatiently exclaimed "Death to all fools," De
Gaulle soberly murmured: "Ah! What a vast program."
The once-lean soldier is now a man with considerable frontage; thick
glasses give him the effect of walking unseeing. The effect has increased his
air of austere remoteness. Outside his family, there is no man who can honestly
call himself De Gaulle's friend, and anyone who strives to achieve uninvited
intimacy with him is brusquely repulsed. On a flight to Algiers a few weeks
ago, mercurial Leon Delbecque, one of the organizers of the insurrection that
led to De Gaulle's return to power, plumped himself down in the seat opposite
the general. Hastily, De Gaulle summoned his trusted military aide Colonel
Gaston de Bonneval for a whispered conversation. When De Bonneval
defensively—and audibly—remarked, "But, mon general, I didn't ask him to sit
there," Delbecque ignominiously retreated.
Provoked beyond endurance by this solemn hauteur, a Frenchman recently
burst out: "He's pleased with the way things have gone, isn't he? Then why
doesn't he ever laugh?" To this question, De Gaulle himself supplied an answer
years ago: "Prestige cannot exist without mystery, for people revere little
what they know too well. All cults have their tabernacles, and no great man is
great in the eyes of his servants."
Some Signal Service. De Gaulle began early to dream of greatness. From his
father, "a thoughtful, cultivated, traditional man," a wounded veteran of the
Franco-Prussian War who taught philosophy at a Jesuit school in Paris. De
Gaulle acquired his absorbing passion for French history. And from childhood
on, God's omnipotence has been intertwined in De Gaulle's mind with the
greatness of France. As an adolescent, he conceived of France as "the princess
in the fairy stories or the Madonna in the frescoes," was convinced that "the
interest of life consisted in one day rendering her some signal service, and
that I would have the occasion to do so."
Inheriting a scholarly tradition on both sides of his family, blessed with
a retentive memory and an analytical intelligence, he sharpened his mind on the
classics, ancient and modern—an exercise that makes him one of the few
statesmen alive who can bolster an argument with references to Heraclitus and
Henri Bergson. His copy-book at Saint-Cyr bore Victor Hugo's maxim: "Concision
in style, precision in thought, decision in life."
Along with first-class intellectual training, De Gaulle acquired from his
mother, a descendant of Scottish and Irish refugees who came to France with the
fleeing Stuarts, a highly individualistic and severe religious faith. His
devout Catholicism is of the kind that has a hatred of waste, ostentation or
levity. It is also intensely private. Recalling in his memoirs the occasion
during World War II when F.D.R. sent Cardinal Spellman to try to convince the
Free French of the rightness of a particular aspect of U.S. policy, De Gaulle
writes: "This eminently pious prelate approached the problems of this world
with an evident care to serve only the cause of God. But the greatest devotion
cannot prevent business from being business."
Friend of Petain. Entering France's famed military academy of Saint-Cyr at
18, Cadet de Gaulle was unfashionably churchgoing, personally reticent,
suitably erudite, but already militarily unorthodox. His hulking, outsized (6
ft. 4 in.) body earned him the nickname "the big asparagus." He graduated among
the top 15 in his class, had his choice of regiments. His pick; the 33rd
Infantry, commanded by Colonel Henri Philippe Petain.
For the next 20 years De Gaulle's career was closely tied to the man who
was one day to become his archenemy, the Petain who "showed me the meaning of
the art and gift of command." Captured by the Germans in 1916 in a hand-to-hand
battle, during which he suffered his third wound of World War I, De Gaulle was
cited for gallantry on Petain's recommendation. When he finally returned to
France, after 32 months in prison camps and five vain attempts at escape, De
Gaulle married Yvonne Vendroux, demure daughter of a biscuit manufacturer from
Calais—and named his first child after Petain. In 1927 Petain, by then a
marshal of France, appointed De Gaulle his aide-de-camp.
The break came in 1934, when De Gaulle published The Army of the Future, a
prescient and skillfully written plea for a small professional army built
around armored divisions capable of exploiting concentrated breakthroughs.
Though it sold only 700 copies in France, the book went like hotcakes (7,000
copies) in Germany and was read aloud to Hitler on the advice of his generals.
But to Petain, obsessed with the superiority of defensive strategy and massed
infantry, the De Gaulle doctrine was heresy. French generals, wrote De Gaulle,
"were growing old at their posts, wedded to errors that once constituted their
glory." Backed only by a handful of admirers, including future Premier Paul
Reynaud, lanky Colonel de Gaulle was regarded in Parisian society as a
mechanized bore.
In another early book, The Sword's Edge, which was as fecklessly ignored
as The Army of the Future, De Gaulle discussed the problems of military command
in such a way as to etch a self- portrait. Items:
— "Evangical perfection does not lead to empire. The man of action cannot be
conceived of without a strong dose of egoism, pride, toughness and cunning."
— "Nothing enhances authority better than silence...As all that comes from the
leader is highly contagious, he creates calm and attention provided he remains
silent."
— "It is necessary that the aim in which the leader absorbs himself should
carry the mark of greatness."
Not Without Grandeur. World War II gave De Gaulle his first real chance to
test his military theories in action. His doctrine of mechanized warfare was
dramatically vindicated—both by the Germans, who used it to conquer France,
and by De Gaulle himself, who, near Abbeville, with a pickup armored division,
dealt the Nazis their only major setback during the invasion.
De Gaulle arrived in London in 1940, alone and an unknown, in a plan
provided by the British. In absentia he was tried and condemned to death for
treason by the Vichy government of Marshal Petain. He let out his famous
rallying cry—"France has lost a battle, but France has not lost the war"—and
thereafter, he and his Cross of Lorraine slowly became the symbols of France.
(Symbol was in fact his Resistance code name.)
He returned to Paris in 1944, the idol of France and commander of 500,000
armed men. Only his own character stood between De Gaulle and a dictator's
power. But as France's first postwar President, he had a precise conception of
his mission: to restore republican order and "let the people pronounce." He
refused to take the drastic action that might have eased France's grievous
economic problems. "You won't get me talking economics and finance for a whole
afternoon again," he told his Finance Minister irritably one day. Yet at the
same time he despised the old "regime of parties," refused to deal with working
politicians. "A man equally incapable of monopolizing power and of sharing it,"
complained one of his ministers.
In the end, the pols prevailed. Under their influence, the French
electorate rejected a constitution that would have given France the strong
executive De Gaulle believed it needed. In an ill-fated attempt to create
national unity, De Gaulle gave the Communists five Cabinet posts, only to have
them revile him because he refused them the crucial Ministries of War, Foreign
Affairs and Interior. Finally, one cold day in January 1946, the general called
in his Cabinet and announced: "You espoused the quarrels of your various
parties. It is not this way that I understand things...I have therefore
resolved to abandon office...My resolution is not subject to discussion." As De
Gaulle walked away, Communist Boss Maurice Thorez broke the stupefied silence.
"This departure does not lack grandeur," he said.
Two-Pistol Technique. The twelve years of retirement that followed were in
some ways the most educational in De Gaulle's life. After abandoning active
efforts at a political comeback in 1953, he continued to drive into Paris from
Colombey once a week to hold court in his Spartan Left Bank office on the Rue
de Solferino. And because he remained for many Frenchmen a kind of father
figure, men of every political current called to confide in him. Without ever
soliciting information, De Gaulle became perhaps the best-informed man in
France on the inner workings and gaping inadequacies of the Fourth Republic.
Even more educational was the composition of his memoirs. Painstakingly
set down in elongated script, the memoirs were written in a classic prose
Frenchmen had not seen in a long time- precise yet lyrical, stamped with honor,
revealing the essential selflessness of a man dedicated to his nation's
grandeur. On the strength of this literary achievement France's
intellectuals—who do so much to set their country's political tone—for the
first time gave De Gaulle their whole hearted admiration. (Though Volume I sold
a mere 6,900 copies in the U.S.) And in the act of reducing his life to book
form, the general reviewed his past mistakes, sketched out alternative plans of
action that might have worked better. Says one of De Gaulle's associates:
"Writing the memoirs made him a political tactician."
Result was that when the frustrated soldiers and settlers of Algiers broke
into revolt last May, De Gaulle was, in his own words and in a sense that had
never been true before, "ready to assume the powers of the Republic." He knew
precisely what assets he had—his own immense prestige and the fact that the
only alternative was civil war. His technique was very much like that of the
bandit hero of a play he had written at 15. In De Gaulle's youthful play the
bandit, as he strips a traveler of his belongings, periodically abandons
flowing Alexandrine verse to declare simply: "Besides, I have two pistols."
Faced with the two-pistol technique the panicky leaders of the Fourth
Republic rapidly wilted. "Each day," complained ex-Premier Georges Bidault,
"our position toward De Gaulle changes. Yesterday we were standing; today we
are on our knees; tomorrow we will be on our bellies."
The Finest Day. Still haunted by the dubious legality of his World War II
Free French movement, De Gaulle was determined that this time nothing should
stain the legitimacy of his power. (If the rebellious generals seized Paris by
force, he told a subordinate, "they will not find De Gaulle in their baggage.")
But to achieve power legitimately, he needed parliamentary approval, above all,
that of the Socialist Party. accordingly, when Socialist Guy Mollet flew down
to Colombey to see whether he could support De Gaulle with a clear conscience,
the general smothered all his longtime contempt for party politics, turned on
such charm that Mollet departed with the declaration: "Today has been the
finest day of my life."
And when time came for the crucial vote in which the Assembly was to send
itself on vacation and grant him untrammeled power for six months, De Gaulle
personally shepherded the measure through, even won admiring guffaws from
members of a system he despised by an ironic reference to "the pleasure and
honor that I find in being with you tonight."
Silence & Her Sister. Once invested as Premier, De Gaulle had three
immediate objectives: to bring the army back under control of the central
government, to win approval of a constitution that would give France a strong
executive, to come to terms with the French colonies' desire for independence
without sacrificing a French relationship with them. To achieve these goals, he
proceeded to employ his resources (which now included unchallenged legitimacy)
according to the rules he had laid down in The Sword's Edge—"economy of force,
the necessity of advancing in strength (and, hence, by stages or bounds),
surprise for the enemy, security for oneself."
In the year's most impressive display of political mastery, De Gaulle made
each of his objectives support the others. By flying Rebel Organizer Jacques
Soustelle out of Algiers and making him his Minister of Information, De Gaulle
yanked the insurgents' sharpest tooth, yet at the same time gave the embattled
settlers enough of a payoff to keep them submissive if not content. By tying
the vote on autonomy for France's Black African territories to the vote on his
proposed constitution, he obliged right-wingers to swallow his liberal colonial
policy, at the same time picked up 9,000,000 African votes to swell his
majority in the constitutional referendum. By showing himself willing to offer
Algeria's Moslem rebels something besides naked force, and by taking the gamble
of extending the constitutional referendum to Algeria, he reconciled many
left-wingers to his tighter, more disciplined constitution, added another
3,500,000 Algerian votes to his majority, and threw the rebel National
Liberation Front onto the psychological defensive.
All along, too, De Gaulle made highly effective use of surprise, silence,
and silence's sister, the oracular utterance. "I have understood you," he told
a wildly cheering crowd during his first trip to Algiers after becoming
Premier. Only four months later, when he abruptly ordered all French army
officers to resign from the insurrectionary Committees of Public Safety, did
the right-wing Europeans of Algiers realize that what he had meant was that he
understood them and disapproved. Last week, with almost equal lack of
forewarning, De Gaulle suddenly began churning out a series of decrees that he
had been quietly preparing ever since his return to power last June. Among
them:
— A 10-25% hike in France's ridiculously low rent ceilings, which have long
been pegged to pre-inflation levels.
— A general overhaul of the judicial system designed to eliminate useless
officials and to raise the pay and professional standards of France's judges.
— A sweeping monetary reform.
— A tough 1959 budget that will halve the deficit by hiking taxes and cutting
"social expenditures" (price supports, veterans' pensions, etc.). His drastic
action should bring some order to France's tangled finances, at the same time
provide funds for massive public investment in both France and Algeria. He
promised nothing but a time of trials, but added that "without the effort to
restore order," France would be a nation "perpetually oscillating between drama
and mediocrity." De Gaulle, who dislikes economics so much, had this time shown
himself willing to take it seriously.
A Time for Miracles. Despite this initial record of accomplishment, de
Gaulle has a long way to go. In fact, his very conditions for returning to
power-that he be summoned on his own unquestioned terms-made it necessary for
circumstances to be almost beyond retrieving before he would take over. The
slope that lies before him is steep. Wonders Socialist Guy Mollet: "Frenchmen
expect miracles of De Gaulle. But can he work miracles?"
The array of troubles before De Gaulle is indeed sobering. The country is
basically prosperous, but its economy is restrictive. Politically, the new
Assembly, calling itself Gaullist, is considerably more rightist in outlook
than the general himself. Above all, the four-year-old Algerian Moslem revolt
continues to drain France of $2,400,000 a day, and prospects for negotiated end
to the fighting, once considered high, were badly dashed last October, when the
rebels angrily considered de Gaulle's soldier-to-soldier, "flag-of-truce" offer
a humiliating proposal.
But such problems, the kind that reduced every leader of the Fourth
Republic to fatalistic acceptance of eventual defeat, provide a kind of elation
to a man of De Gaulle's temperament. "France," he wrote in his memoirs, "is not
really herself unless in the front rank. Only vast enterprises are capable of
counterbalancing the ferments of dispersal which are inherent in her people."
As for himself, De Gaulle has never abandoned the position he took a quarter of
a century ago: "Faced with crisis, the man of character falls back on himself.
He imposes his own stamp on action, takes responsibility for it, makes it his
own...Difficulty attracts the man of character because it is in embracing it
that he realizes himself."
These were bold, proud words. But underlying them is the deepest of all De
Gaulle's convictions: "Glory gives herself only to those who have always
dreamed of her." In 1958, obedient to his maxim, glory gave herself to Charles
de Gaulle.
COVERS GALLERY: Click here to see the cover image from 1958
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