Family Circle

"To assure the security of Western Europe," wrote Charles de Gaulle in the final volume of his memoirs, it will be necessary for France "to lead into one political, economic and strategic grouping the states whose frontiers run with the Rhine, the Alps and the Pyrenees."

On the Alpine side, since De Gaulle came to power, Italy has become a staunch backer of France's policy in Algeria. On the Rhine, Adenauer's Germany has forged new links with its old enemy. And last week Spanish officials in Paris were humming contentedly about a new "era of good feeling."

Before De Gaulle, no French government would have dared outrage French liberals and leftists by clasping hands with Dictator Franco. Even now not all Frenchmen would appreciate Franco's testimonial that De Gaulle's return to power "shows to what extent that country which gave birth to the democratic system of government abominates it and rejects it." On their side of the Pyrenees, the Spanish still nurse resentments from the Napoleonic invasion of 1808.*

De Gaulle's France not only got Spain invited into the Organization for European Economic Cooperation, but helped it get OEEC aid. Last September De Gaulle himself told Spain's Foreign Minister Fernando Maria Castiella y Maiz that "Franco and the Spanish people have rendered great services to the world--the new Spanish stability marks a step toward complete Western European integration." Finally in October, just 300 years after Spain's Chief Minister Luis de Haro and Cardinal Mazarin of France met on a tiny neutral island in the little Bidassoa River to sign the Peace of the Pyrenees, the Foreign Ministers of the two nations met again. What Napoleon did in between was not mentioned. Said Castiella: "The day of complete friendship and loyalty between Europeans has come."

His Pyrenees flank in better shape, De Gaulle could continue to the next item on his agenda for France, expressed in the next sentence of his memoirs: "To make of it one of the three world powers, to become one day, if need be, the arbiter between the Soviet and Anglo-Saxon camps."

* Which the Spanish call the Third Invasion, the first being the Roman, the second the Moorish, and the fourth--and current peaceful one --the American.

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