Douglas Johnson

‘La France Libre,’ de Gaulle wrote to Jean Marin, who’d been his companion in London from the summer of 1940 and was now the Director of the Agence France-Presse, ‘that was the finest thing we ever did.’ He believed this. Many of his closest associates believed it too. But as the leader of la France Libre (and la France Combattante), de Gaulle was hardly a free man. Dependent on British money, controlled in his utterances by the Foreign Office and the BBC, at the mercy of a hundred intrigues and rumours, watched by the critical and grudgingly admiring Churchill and by the hostile and non-comprehending Roosevelt, de Gaulle was forced to fight battles which were not of his choosing and usually far removed from his own more grandiose preoccupations. The man who defined his objectives by consulting the globe rather than a mere atlas was too often reduced to scrutinising an agenda that had been prepared by British civil servants. It was only in 1958 when he was elected President of the new Fifth Republic that he was able to exercise a power and to enjoy a prestige that were free both from the supervisions of foreign governments and the constraining confusions of the Liberation. It is true that he continued to see his legitimacy as deriving as much from the achievements of June 1940, when he carried with him to London both the sovereignty and the honour of France, as from the vote of 21 December 1958 when a restricted electorate chose him as President. It is true, too, that when he took up residence in the Elysée Palace in January 1959 (he would have preferred Vincennes, Versailles or the Invalides, anywhere on the Left Bank, because, he said, ‘you don’t make history in the eighth arrondissement’), he brought with him those who had been his companions in London or who had followed him in the unsuccessful adventure of the Rassemblement du Peuple Français, men such as Geoffroy de Courcel, Pierre Lefranc, Jacques Foccart or François Flohic. The Fifth Republic was not to be a resuscitation of the headquarters of Carlton Gardens or the Rue de Solférino, however. De Gaulle surrounded himself with what were for him new men, some of them products of the recently-created Ecole Nationale d’ Administration. In spite of a pessimism that was both innate and a natural reflection of the fact that he was now 68 (‘I’m ten years too old,’ he used to say and he was constantly haunted by the spectre of the senile Pétain), he created the machinery for a new and lasting type of Presidency. He established the role of the President under the new constitution and he indicated the part that France would play in Europe and the rest of the world. It is these impressive and significant years which Jean Lacouture now describes.

An interesting moment has been reached in de Gaulle studies. That the traditional approach has by no means been exhausted is shown by the biography by Don Cook, a journalist on the Los Angeles Times. It is still possible, and some would say still desirable, to write about the General using the same evidence and the same anecdotes that have already been used by scores of other writers. As the music-hall comedian said to his partner who was complaining about their act, ‘it was good enough for my mother and father and it’s good enough for you.’ But with the research organised by such bodies as the Institut Charles-de-Gaulle and the Institut d’Histoire du Temps Présent bringing together those who knew and who worked with the General and historians with an interest in establishing their own analyses and narratives, we are able to proceed to new assessments both of de Gaulle himself and of those long periods of history with which he was associated. New documents and témoignages have become available, and we are now in a position to look more sceptically at sources, such as the General’s own memoirs, which earlier had demanded almost uncritical acceptance.

Revolutions have frequently been analysed and categorised. Wars, and the art of war, have been carefully studied. But the category of civil wars has been neglected. Perhaps this is because they are difficult to recognise or to define. Should we continue to write about guerres franco-françaises, arising from the Paris Commune, the Resistance movements, or the Organisation de l’Armée Secrète formed by Algerian settlers, or should we think of them as civil wars? Often there is a reluctance to admit to the existence of civil wars as anything other than an accident or temporary aberration: many English historians have liked to play down the importance of the English Civil War and tell anecdotes about the way in which the two sides paused at the moment of battle so that a hunting party could pass between them, or, more philosophically, to ask whether the Civil War had any effect on English history at all. Civil wars can be dismissed as the terrorist activities of small groups of individuals whose aggressive intolerance or violent insistence upon their own identities causes them to reject, for as long as they can, the society that envelops them. Since the antagonists in civil wars invariably appeal to foreigners to come and assist them, the story of civil wars becomes embroiled in questions of invasion and of international relations, thus creating the sort of complexities which make historians impatient.

We still have a Queen of Crime. For nearly twenty years Ruth Rendell has been hailed as the successor to Sayers, Christie, Marsh and Allingham, perpetuating the old question of why it is that there should be a particularly feminine talent for detective fiction. Her Chief Inspector, Wexford by name, has joined the ranks of legendary police heroes, and although he is Sussex-based he can occasionally, via a nephew, call upon the resources of Scotland Yard. He has become such a real character that there have been women readers who would, apparently, have liked to marry him, whilst some of their male counterparts have been eager to identify with a character whose successes are due to the patient intelligence that compensates for growing old.

Has anyone ever written a satirical account of the first meeting between Simone de Beauvoir and Sartre? In an age when victims long to be mocked, in a country where satire is an essential part of the cultural heritage, and with two principals who have together inspired much controversy and aroused much dislike, the apparent absence of ridicule must be significant. There is, in fact, an appealing dignity about the way in which these two lives became linked together. It was in July 1929 that René Maheu, later to become a tempestuous director of Unesco, introduced Simone de Beauvoir to Sartre at the Ecole Normale Supérieure. They were both preparing for the oral part of the competitive examination in philosophy, the agrégation. They were both successful. Beauvoir, who had been given the sobriquet Castor (or Beaver) by Maheu, has claimed that when they went their separate ways that August, she knew that Sartre would always be a part of her life. In 1973, Sartre told an interviewer that he had never been so close to any woman as he had been to le Castor. After his death, seven years later, Beauvoir wrote in La Cérémonie des Adieux: