A Glimpse of Glory, a Shiver of Grandeur
All my life, I have had a certain idea of France. The emotional side of me naturally imagines France as the princess of the fairy tales or the Madonna of the frescoes, as though dedicated to a lofty and exceptional destiny. In short, in my view, France cannot be France without grandeur.
HIS banner, emblazoned with the Cross of Lorraine, was drawn from the frescoes of history, and under it Charles de Gaulle waged a lifelong battle for the glory of France. Like the Christian crusaders who set out from medieval cathedrals, De Gaulle was on a journey that was both spiritual and temporal. He rescued his nation not once but twicethe first time from the shame of its capitulation to the Nazis in World War II, the second from its own quarreling factions. With the Fifth Republic, he gave France its first strong governmental framework since the days of Louis Napoleon. He was indeed "I'homme du destin," as Winston Churchill once called him, and even his name, suggestive of both Charlemagne and ancient Gaul, was perfectly suited to the role he took upon himself. When De Gaulle died last week, just 13 days before his 80th birthday, President Georges Pompidou summed up the crusade: "He gave France her governing institutions, her independence and her place in the world."
Andre Malraux, the writer and intellectual who served as De Gaulle's Minister of Culture, called him "a man of the day before yesterday and the day after tomorrow." Like most crusaders, De Gaulle was extraordinarily farsighted but sometimes, maddeningly, he deliberately seemed to narrow his vision. From the day he proclaimed a French government in exile during World War II, his imperious manner and fragile sensibilities frequently infuriated his nation's closest allies. In a vain effort to force French leadership on Europe, he twice vetoed Britain's entry into the Continent's first economic cooperative, the Common Market. At home, he stinted on public welfare, in the form of new roads, telephones and a thousand other needed improvements, to pay for symbolically important but ultimately hollow shows of prestige like the nuclear force de frappe. When his countrymen rejected him in 1969 by voting down some comparatively minor constitutional changes, he declared: "One must understand that the march toward and on the heights cannot last without some respite," and retreated to his country home. Never again did he return to Paris or make a public appearance.
In the end, both his nation and the world sensed the magnitude of their loss. At the tiny country churchyard where he was buried and along Paris' Champs-Elysees, hundreds of thousands of Frenchmen paid him homage. The world's dignitaries journeyed to Paris for a memorial service in greater numbers than for any other event in French history. Le Monde called it "a planetary mourning." Flags were lowered to half-mast not only in Paris but also in London and far-off Peking. Among thousands of condolence messages that reached Madame de Gaulle was one from China's Chairman, Mao Tse-tung, who also sent a funeral wreath.
For De Gaulle, who often described old age as a "shipwreck," it was a merciful end. He spent Monday, Nov. 9, as he had spent almost every other day since leaving office 18 months before. He took two strolls, one alone and one with his wife Yvonne, around his beloved nine-acre country estate, La Boisserie (the woodland glade), in the tiny farming village of Colombey-les-Deux-Eglises, 120 miles southeast of Paris. At noon, he ate a robust lunch, topped off by one of his favorite cream pastries and his usual cup of extra-strong coffee. He chatted with a neighboring farmer, Rene Piot, about fencing an adjoining piece of land that he had recently purchased.
Much of his time was devoted to his memoirs. To the few visitors he received at Colombey, De Gaulle said: "I will finish three books, if God grants me life." The Renewal, Volume I of the projected three-volume Memoirs of Hope, appeared six weeks ahead of schedule in October, and immediately became the fastest seller in French publishing history. Last week De Gaulle was working on the third chapter of the second book, which was due to be published late next year. As usual, he dictated to his secretary from notes, frequently staring out the window at La Boisserie's ancient trees while searching for details in his prodigious memory. In the late afternoon, he looked over the typewritten manuscript, editing heavily in a firm hand.
While waiting for the 7:45 p.m. television news, he played a game of solitaire in the living room, then stood up to get the TV programming guide. Suddenly grimacing, he clutched his side. "What is the matter with me?" he cried aloud. Slumping on the couch, he whispered: "Yvonne, I hurt on my right side. Call a doctor." Madame de Gaulle ordered the servant to telephone for both a doctor and a priest. Abbe Claude Jaugey, the De Gaulles' family priest, found the general in "great pain." While the last sacraments were being administered, De Gaulle sank into unconsciousness. Shortly after Dr. Guy Lacheny arrived, he was pronounced dead of a massive rupture of the aorta.
With glacial calm, Madame de Gaulle asked that news of the General's death be withheld "until I can notify my family." She quickly reached her daughter Elizabeth in Paris, who set out for Colombey with her husband General Alain de Boissieu. Son Philippe, a navy captain stationed in Brest, was more difficult to locate. As a result, Pompidou was not notified until 4 a.m., and it was not until 17 1/2 hours after his mentor's death that he finally went on television. "General de Gaulle is dead," he said. "France is a widow."
The Last Effect
Nearly 19 years ago, De Gaulle had given Pompidou a sealed envelope to be opened after his death. Its contents proved to be an extraordinary last command. De Gaulle once wrote that "great leaders have always stage-managed their effects." Clearly, he was determined for his own last effect to be one of grandeur in sheer understatement. De Gaulle insisted on an "extremely simple" funeral, "without the slightest public ceremony." The gravestone, he directed, should read only CHARLES DE GAULLE, 1890-____. He was to be buried in the churchyard of Notre Dame de Colombey, next to his daughter Anne, who was born retarded and died in 1948 at the age of 20. He had always had a deep and very special love for his handicapped daughter. "He walked with her hand-in-hand around the property," recalls one Colombey resident, "caressing her and talking quietly about the things she understood."
Like Georges Clemenceau, who was buried with rites of spartan simplicity in the Vendee 41 years ago, De Gaulle sternly prohibited any trace of pomp. Wrote De Gaulle: "I want no national funeral. Neither President nor Ministers nor Assembly committees nor public authorities." But, he added, "the men and women of France and of other countries may, if they wish, do my memory the honor of accompanying my body to its last resting place."
Those instructions left Pompidou with the uncomfortable job of tending the Presidents and Kings who genuinely wanted to honor De Gaulle. At an emergency Cabinet meeting, Pompidou decided on a memorial service, to be held on the same day as the funeral, in the Cathedral of Notre Dame.
Few men could have drawn the historic parade of national leaders, including 63 present and former heads of state or government and princes, who walked down the 260-ft. main aisle of Notre Dame. President Nixon decided to fly to Paris almost as soon as he learned of De Gaulle's death; in a message to Pompidou, he noted that "greatness knows no national boundaries." Other mourners included Soviet President Nikolai Podgorny, India's Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, President Giuseppe Saragat of Italy, Archbishop Makarios of Cyprus and Britain's Prime Minister Edward Heath.
There were six reigning monarchs: Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia, the Shah of Iran, Queen Juliana of The Netherlands, King Baudouin of Belgium, Prince Rainier of Monaco and Grand Duke Jean of Luxembourg. Charles, Prince of Wales, was seated among other young royalty, including Norway's Crown Prince Harald and Sweden's Crown Prince Carl Gustav. From what was once French Africa came leaders and statesmen from 17 now independent nations, including Senegal's Leopold Sedar Senghor and the Ivory Coast's Felix Houphouet-Boigny, who revered De Gaulle as the father of their freedom. Several faces from the past turned up, notably Israel's Elder Statesman David Ben-Gurion, former British Prime Ministers the Earl of Avon (Anthony Eden), Harold Macmillan and Harold Wilson, and former West German Chancellors Ludwig Erhard and Kurt-Georg Kiesinger. Seated among the 6,000 mourners in Notre Dame was Senator Edward Kennedy, who remembered De Gaulle's immediate decision to attend the presidential funeral of his brother John in 1963. In the north transept, easily recognizable despite dark glasses and a dark kerchief, was Marlene Dietrich. Notable absentees: any high-level members of the Nigerian government, which is still bitter over De Gaulle's support of the breakaway state of Biafra; and Canadian Prime Minster Pierre Elliott Trudeau. It was impossible to know whether Trudeau, a staunch Canadian federalist, stayed away because he was still furious over De Gaulle's famous cry "Vive la Quebec libre!" during a 1967 visit there, or simply too burdened by the emergency caused by separatist terrorism. The former seems probable.
Simplicity at Colombey
Within the cathedral, the dark clothes of the mourners contrasted with the brilliant red trimmings on the uniforms of the Garde Republicaine. A soft light from the huge circles of the rose windows was obscured by scores of arc lights for color-TV coverage. In the apse behind the choir hung an enormous ceiling-to-floor tricolor. When Pompidou and his wife entered, the white-robed cathedral choir began a chorale from Bach's St. Matthew Passion. Within an hour, the service ended with a Magnificat. The same anthem had closed the Notre Dame service in which De Gaulle offered a prayer of thanksgiving after his triumphant return to Paris in 1944.
At Colombey, De Gaulle's request for an "extremely simple" service was followed to the letter. Carpenter Louis Merger, 59, said that Madame de Gaulle "asked for the same kind of casket I make for everybody else. When I asked if she didn't want something military, she said 'Non.' " Pointing to the extra-length (6 ft. 11 in.) oak coffin, lined with white quilt and trimmed with an aluminum cross, Merger added: "He was right. Who would need anything more?" Total cost: $72, or $9 more than usual, because of the size.
In and around Colombey were thousands of cars, parked along roads and in fields. Nine special trains brought other mourners. All together, some 40,000 men and womenmany of them carrying blankets and picnic basketsconverged on the small square outside Notre Dame de Colombey. The crowd was packed so tightly that those who fainted had to be passed overhead toward first-aid stations.
Promptly at 3 p.m., an armored reconnaissance car pulled into the church square, carrying De Gaulle's tricolor-draped casket. It was borne into the church by ten local young men, including a farmer, a cheesemaker and three college students. Inside, wearing a black veil, Madame de Gaulle took the second-row pew that she had shared with the General at countless 11:30 a.m. Sunday Masses over the years. She was flanked by Philippe, who at 48 bears a striking resemblance to the tall, angular brigadier general his father had been years ago. Around her were some 250 compagnons in the Order of the Liberation and a few officials from De Gaulle's reign, including Malraux and his last Premier, Maurice Couve de Murville. In addition, about 50 seats were filled with regular parishionersmen in shiny Sunday serge, women wearing simple peasant scarves. After the requiem Mass, the casket was carried the last few yards and lowered into the plot beside Anne's, which De Gaulle and his wife, who will also be buried there, visited every week. Each member of the family sprinkled holy water from an aspergillum on the , lowered casket.
Throughout the night and until week's end, a steady stream of mourners filed by the graveside, turning it instantly into a national shrine. Perhaps the most eloquent aftermath occurred in Paris. At the height of the evening rush hour, several hundred veterans of De Gaulle's Free French Armywearing the faded red berets of the Spahis, a North African unit, and the moth-eaten blue caps of the colonial regiments that became the General's first followersbegan marching up the Champs-Elysees toward l'Etoile. Though a drenching rain was falling and the chill November wind rustled in the chestnut trees, throngs of departing office workers and other passers-by joined the silent, stately procession. By the time it reached the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in what had been known as Place de l'Etoile but last week was rechristened Place Charles de Gaulle, the crowd numbered a quarter of a million people. There were businessmen and young army draftees, girls in maxicoats from the Left Bank and old women in black, factory workers and elegant matrons, and whole families walking under a single umbrella. They sang the Marseillaise and deposited mounds of wet flowers at the tomb. By the end of the parade, the mimosas and roses, carnations and violets had been piled five feet high, in the shape of a giant Cross of Lorraine.
Thucydides at Bedtime
That cross, symbol of Joan of Arc as well as De Gaulle's Free French forces, was a supremely appropriate final tribute to a man who had courted glory all his life. "Glory," he wrote in 1934, "gives herself only to those who have always dreamed of her." From childhood, De Gaulle cherished his own dream of glory for France as well as for himself. The son of a philosophy professor who taught in a Jesuit school, Charles developed an almost mystical association with his country.
As a young student, he was impressed by the teaching of Auguste Comte, whose positivism renounced flowery philosophical argumentation in favor of deductions based on observable facts. But he was also influenced by Nobel Prizewinner Henri Bergson, who emphasized the importance of intuition; by the 17th century playwright Corneille, who said man's overriding duty was to place reason above emotion; and by the flowing richness of the language of Racine, Bossuet, Victor Hugo and Chateaubriand. In later life, he was a voracious and catholic reader, consuming everything from gardening books to German military tracts in the original. He considered Thucydides good bedtime reading.
De Gaulle chose the army as his profession and, when he entered Saint-Cyr, wrote on his copybook Hugo's maxim: "Concision in style, precision in thought, decision in life." At Saint-Cyr, De Gaulle's lean, 6-ft. 4-in. frame won him the nickname "Asparagus." Graduated 13th in a class of 212, he joined Colonel Philippe Petain's 33rd Infantry. When World War I broke out two years later, De Gaulle, a company commander, was wounded three times. Near Verdun, he was struck by shell fire and captured by the Germans. The French at first thought he was dead. He made three unsuccessful escape attempts, finally submitted to captivity and began collecting material for his first major book, Discord Among the Enemy, which blamed imperial Germany's downfall on the army's refusal to obey civilian authority.
In 1921, De Gaulle married Yvonne Vendroux, whose family owned a biscuit company. After attending France's war college, De Gaulle was appointed Marshal Petain's aide-de-camp. As France withdrew politically and militarily behind the supposedly impregnable Maginot Line, De Gaulle protested against the purely defensive strategy that it epitomized. "Colonel Motor," as his critics called him, published a prescient book, The Army of the Future, in which he argued for a 100,000-man professional army built mainly around armored divisions.
De Gaulle's theories were vindicated in 1940 when Hitler's fast-rolling panzers outflanked the Maginot Line and knifed into France. Given command of a newly formed armored division, De Gaulle managed to inflict a setback on the invaders before he was appointed a junior Cabinet Minister. As France's military leaders contemplated surrender, De Gaulle escaped by Royal Air Force plane to London. On June 18, 1940, the day after Marshal Petain announced that he was seeking an end to the fighting, Charles de Gaulle spoke to the people of France from London. "Has the last word been said?" he asked. "Is our defeat final and irremediable? To those questions, I answer no! Whatever happens, the flame of French resistance must not and shall not die."
De Gaulle had neither following, funds nor authority. The collaborationist Vichy regime condemned him to death as a traitor. No matter. He imperiously insisted that he was the acting chief of a great power and demanded an equal voice with the other Allied leaders. "I am too poor to bow," he told Churchill. De Gaulle's attitude rankled Franklin D. Roosevelt, who shared British Novelist H.G. Wells' opinion of him as "an utterly sincere megalomaniac." Churchill moaned that "of all the crosses I have had to bear, the Cross of Lorraine was the heaviest." By the time De Gaulle returned to France in the wake of the Allied invasion in June 1944, he was a national legend.
Political Comeback
Under De Gaulle's guidance, France began to set up the Fourth Republic and the old political parties reappeared. Le General would not lower himself to join one. "De Gaulle is not on the left," he said. "Nor on the right. Nor in the center. He is above." As provisional Premier, De Gaulle became increasingly annoyed by the revival of the bickering that had paralyzed previous governments. He summoned his Ministers to a Sunday meeting in 1946 and turned up in full uniform. "You have espoused the quarrels of your various parties," he told them. "I disapprove of this, but unless I establish by force a dictatorship, which I don't want and which would no doubt end up badly, I haven't the means to prevent this experiment. Therefore, I must withdraw . . . If you fail, at least I shall remain intact." Brushing aside all discussion, he strode regally from the room.
The next year, De Gaulle attempted a political comeback by founding his own party, Rassemblement du Peuple Franc,ais (RPF), but it failed to gain sufficient strength to bring him to power. In 1955, De Gaulle once more announced his retirement from public life. "I say farewell to you," he declared. "We shall not meet again until the tempest again looses itself on France."
By 1958, a tempest born in Algeria threatened to engulf France in civil war. French military leaders, stung by defeats in Indochina and feeling betrayed by the politicians, were determined to put down the Arab revolt even if they first had to seize Paris and install a new government. The army, joined by longtime French settlers in Algeria and powerful economic interests in France, clamored for the return of De Gaulle to power in the belief that he would hold on to the colony. As the condition for his return, De Gaulle demanded emergency powers, including the right to rule by decree for six months. Four days after the National Assembly acquiesced, he flew to Algiers and told a cheering French crowd, "I have understood you."
He understood them, but he did not heed them. He had long been convinced that France must free itself of the burden of colonial possessions. As early as 1934, he had written: "What real and lasting profit can be had by such annexations?" Turning first to France's twelve Black African colonies, he offered them immediate independence and the possibility of a voluntary economic association with France. Then De Gaulle cracked down on the rebellious French military and made peace with Algerian rebels.
In September 1958, De Gaulle made another major move, submitting a new constitution to the French people. It changed the country from a parliamentary system to a presidential one, granting the chief executive the right to dissolve the National Assembly and to rule by decree in selected areas. De Gaulle's definition of the new system: "The Assemblies debate, the Ministers govern, the constitutional council thinks, the President of the Republic decides."
War-weary Frenchmen, fed up with continual government crises, were hap py to let De Gaulle do the deciding. By an overwhelming margin, they approved the new constitution in a referendum and elected De Gaulle the first President of the new Fifth Republic. He quickly took firm control.
Against the Tide
Foreigners, including France's closest and oldest allies, soon discovered that a strong France was not going to be easy to live with. Postwar developments shaped a close alliance between the Continent and the U.S., but De Gaulle wanted to organize a "Europe of fatherlands" that would look East as well as West, and would implausibly stretch from the Atlantic to the Urals. He wanted a Europe free of domination by either the U.S. or the Soviet Union, a third force that could arbitrate, if need be. between the two opposing blocs.
Because of the force of De Gaulle's imposing personality and keen insight, France came to wield disproportionate power (in 1959. it had a medium-size population of 47 million and a G.N.P. of $48.6 billion). He recognized earlier than most that the nuclear standoff between the U.S. and Russia afforded other countries considerable room for maneuver. While enjoying the protection of the U.S. nuclear umbrella, he attacked American economic penetration of Europe, and unsuccessfully sought to undermine American business expansion by trying to persuade other countries to reject the dollar in favor of a return to the gold standard"that most precious of metals." He declared that the U.S. commitment to defend Europe against Soviet attack was meaningless, arguing that Washington would never risk Russian nuclear retaliation against American cities to save its allies. Finally, in 1966, he withdrew France from military participation in NATO but retained political membership in the Atlantic Alliance.
Though De Gaulle sought a system of economic and political cooperation in Europe, he balked at the development of the supranational agencies, which were essential to bring about such cooperation. To De Gaulle, the only legitimate political entity was the nation-state. The Common Market, the European Coal and Steel Community, and Europe's other international agencies were repugnant because they adulterated the essence of national identity. His stand against European unity may well have cost him the opportunity to be Europe's first President.
He did move, however, to erase the old enmity between French and Germans. Though De Gaulle was raised on his father's stories of his wounds and France's disgrace in the Franco-Prussian War, le General had a profound respect for the abilities of the Germans. On a visit to the Soviet Union in 1945, De Gaulle stopped off to see the battlefield at Stalingrad. For a long time, he stood mute before the incredible destruction. Molotov waited for his comment. Finally it came. "Un grand peuple," De Gaulle said somberly. "Un grand peupleles allemands."
De Gaulle regarded London's application to join the Common Market as a Trojan horse that would give the U.S. an entree to Europe--"the American hand in the British glove," he called it. As a result, he vetoed Britain's application in 1963, setting back the rest of Europe's then bright dreams of eventual political federation.
Despite his conservative attitude toward the concept of Europe, De Gaulle pursued venturesome policies elsewhere. In 1964, France became the first Western power since the Korean War to extend recognition to Peking. He became the first Western statesman who actively sought to build ties with the East Bloc and to overcome the rigidities of the cold war. He proposed a gradual easing of tension by a process he described as deeente, entente, cooperation. He recognized the Oder-Neisse line as Poland's western border and urged Bonn to do the same. He also urged international acceptance of East Germany. The basic outlines of Willy Brandt's Ostpolitik were traced several years earlier by De Gaulle. In the Middle East, De Gaulle dropped his support of Israel following the 1967 war. Then, after reprimanding the Jews as an "elite, domineering people," he made overtures to the Arabs that were intended, his apologists maintain, to retain Western influence in an area that had only Russia as an alternative.
Always, De Gaulle deported himself according to the stern precepts of leadership he laid down in 1934 in a small book called The Edge of the Sword. "Nothing demonstrates authority better than silence," he wrote. "There can be no prestige without mystery, for we have little reverence for that which we know too well." De Gaulle rarely granted private press interviews and seldom appeared in public. At his press conferences, held about every six months, 1,000 or so journalists would sit on frail gilded chairs in an ornate reception hall in the Elysee as De Gaulle answered the questions that suited him and invariably passed over the others.
His bulky form made him a tempting target for assassination, and the diehard Secret Army Organization, which despised him for giving up Algeria, was gunning for him. In all, there were at least ten plots and two actual attempts to kill him. Once, on a road near Paris, his black presidential Citroen was riddled with bullets. But De Gaulle and his wife remained sitting erect in the back seat, refusing even to duck. After all, he once wrote: "Adversity attracts the man of character . . . He seeks out the bitter joy of responsibility."
If De Gaulle's speech was stately and oracular in public, it was often earthy in conversations with friends. Like Lenin, he seems to have commented on everything and everybody. On John F. Kennedy: "[a President] with the style of a hairdresser's assistanthe combed his way through problems." On Jackie Kennedy, after John Kennedy's death: "She'll end up on an oilman's yacht." On Harry Truman: "a merchant." On Richard Nixon, 1963: "This man has a great future in store for him."
When De Gaulle was out of power, he liked to describe the continual shifts of Ministers in the Fourth Republic's Cabinets by saying, "Chose, machin, chouette [thingamabob, thingamajig, whosit] are being replaced by chouette, machin, chose." He often referred to members of the National Assembly as pisse froid or pisse vinaigre. In private, he often called France "vacharde"--inert or uninspired. The fact was that France offered De Gaulle too limited a scope and power base. Try as he might, he could not change the basic reality that France simply lacked the specific gravity to offset the force of a superpower.
De Gaulle's narrow victory in the 1965 presidential election should have warned him that his popularity was not boundless. He shrugged off the growing disorders in early spring of 1968 to fly off for a chat with Rumania's Nicolae Ceausescu. While he was being feted in Bucharest, much of France erupted in chaos, as students battled police and striking workers seized plants. Shaken, De Gaulle returned and, after making certain of the army's support, finally rallied his country. After a ringing speech ("I shall not withdraw. I have a mandate from the people."), a million Frenchmen marched down the Champs-Elysees in support of De Gaulle.
The following year, De Gaulle chose to turn a referendum on the establishment of regional governments (a relatively popular issue) and the downgrading of the Senate (an unpopular one) into a vote of confidence on his presidency. As the returns showed that the trend was running irreversibly against him, De Gaulle sent a two-sentence message to Paris from Colombey: "I am ceasing to exercise my functions as President of the Republic. This decision takes effect at noon today."
Though the dimensions of De Gaulle's place in French history are already evident, years must pass before a conclusion can be reached on such questions as whether Europe was actually better served by keeping Britain out in the cold a while longer. Harvard Political Scientist Stanley Hoffmann, for one, believes that if Utopian federalists had managed to achieve some sort of European unity ten or 15 years ago, it would have been "a merger of confused peoples not knowing what they were doing. The kind of Western Europe that is emerging now is a very pragmatic Europe, cooperating step by step in areas where they are indeed highly interdependent. This is what De Gaulle had in mind." But others point out that De Gaulle's "no" killed a certain spirit, born of the war and the Communist takeovers in Eastern Europe, that provided a supranational impulse toward rapid federation.
Whatever the historical judgment on his leadership, De Gaulle demonstrated the importance of those great intangibles in the calculus of power--moral force, will, style, vision. To many men, these are only words; they were realities to De Gaulle, realities that the world often distrusts and yet yearns for more than ever today. These qualities, as much as any specific accomplishments, will make his figure endure, just as the memory of another great--and even more controversial-- Frenchman has survived through the years. As a young man, Charles de Gaulle composed a tribute to Napoleon Bonaparte that could serve as his own epitaph: "In spite of the time that has gone by, of opposing sentiments and new subjects for mourning, crowds from every part of the world render homage to his memory and near his grave abandon themselves to a shiver of grandeur."
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