Return to public life of Charles de Gaulle

De Gaulle’s compatriots were deeply divided on the question of his return to public life. The reasons for their hesitation belong to the political history of the period. The opportunity presented itself in May 1958 when the insurrection that had broken out in Algiers threatened to bring civil war to France. De Gaulle must have seen his return to politics as the most carefully balanced calculation in a life that had had its share of political gambles. He was cautious, for it was by no means certain that the French parliament would accept his return on conditions that he could accept. He affirmed his determination not to come to power by other than legal means, and there was never any evidence of his association with insurgent plans to bring him back; however, his carefully worded statements (on May 15, 19, and 27) certainly helped the insurgents. On June 1, three days after President René Coty threatened to resign unless de Gaulle’s return to power was accepted, de Gaulle presented himself before the National Assembly as a prime minister designate. On the following day he attended the parliamentary session (after he was duly invested as prime minister) that authorized him to reform the constitution and accorded him the special powers that he demanded.

On December 21, 1958, de Gaulle was elected president of the republic. The powers given to the president in the new constitution, which had been approved by referendum on September 28, 1958, especially those providing for the use of the referendum and for presidential rule during a state of emergency, reflected his firm conviction that a strong state required a leader with the power to make decisions. De Gaulle realized that his fellow citizens would accept him only in a crisis and that he must, therefore, take steps to retain the support of the general public and to disarm the power of “the system of parties” in parliament, always potentially hostile to him. His tactics were first to obtain consent for the personal control of government policy by the president and then to ensure its renewal through elections or referenda. He therefore undertook throughout his presidency what was virtually a continuous election campaign in the form of provincial tours, in which he visited every département and during which he met ordinary citizens as well as local notables. He appeared on television several times a year. He relied as far as possible on ministers who were compagnons—those whose loyalties went back to the wartime days—and counted on their use of the constitutional provisions to curb the powers of the deputies to obstruct parliamentary business or harass governments.

De Gaulle retained the essential function of parliaments in a democracy—namely, the right to criticize governments and to withdraw confidence in them. There were frequent complaints of progovernmental bias on the radio, but these also had been common under pre-Gaullist regimes. Under a law of 1881, insults to the president of the republic constitute an offense, and, while there was certainly more recourse to this law during de Gaulle’s presidency than under previous regimes, it presented no obstacle to political criticisms of Gaullist policies and Gaullist ministers in the press and by political parties. Indeed, those criticisms were continual and widespread.

De Gaulle’s greatest challenge in his early years as president was to find a way to resolve the bloody and extraordinarily divisive Algerian War. France’s influential left-wing intellectuals supported Algerian independence and wanted de Gaulle to find a face-saving way to end the war quickly. The European residents of Algeria and their many supporters on the mainland, most of them politically conservative, wanted France to retain Algeria at all costs. The leaders of the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN), meanwhile, were willing to discuss nothing short of full independence. De Gaulle realized that he had no choice but to end the war, and, when he began peace negotiations with the FLN, French military leaders in Algiers turned against him, forming a rebel faction known as the Secret Army Organization (OAS).

In April 1961 the OAS seized control of Algiers and threatened to take Paris as well. De Gaulle responded vigorously, using the emergency powers permitted by the constitution of the Fifth Republic. Most French citizens rallied to de Gaulle, and after a tense standoff the OAS action fell apart. The bulk of the military refused to side with the rebellious generals, and de Gaulle’s peace initiative was allowed to proceed. The bloodletting, however, was not over. The OAS, now a full-fledged terrorist organization, undertook a wave of bombings and assassinations (including attempts on de Gaulle) that left some 12,000 victims. But the overwhelming majority of the population supported de Gaulle, allowing him to negotiate Algerian independence (1962) and defeat the OAS.

Having been preoccupied with Algeria during his first three years, de Gaulle was finally in a position to turn to other pressing matters. Beginning in 1962, he moved to strengthen the country’s economy, planned the reorganization of the army, developed an independent nuclear deterrent, and prevented fresh “Algerias” in the future by providing for the constitutional transformation of the African overseas territories into 12 politically independent states. From mid-1962 onward, however, with the recognition of an independent Algerian state, he had to consolidate his own position by obtaining a fresh vote of confidence from the electorate, for he was no longer politically indispensable.

One lesson that de Gaulle had learned was that his personal position was stronger if he remained, at least in theory, above the political and party battle, as he had tried to do during the wartime and early postwar years. Before the elections of 1958, he had therefore forbidden his supporters to use his name, “even in the form of an adjective,” in the title of any group or candidate. In 1962 he offered the electors the choice between his resignation and acceptance of a constitutional amendment providing for the election of the president by universal suffrage. Under the original constitution, the president was to be chosen by an electoral college of some 80,000 members, mainly mayors and local leaders. The electors favoured the amendment overwhelmingly. During the parliamentary general election in November, the Gaullist party won an additional 64 seats, thus obtaining, with the support of some 30 conservative deputies, a majority in the National Assembly. From then on, de Gaulle was in a position to carry out, with public consent, the plans that he regarded as essential in restoring France to the status of a great power.

As a statesman, de Gaulle fought his political battles like a military campaign, using all the devices that he had learned to transform France’s postwar international position of weakness into one of strength and to overcome opposition to his plans at home. These devices have been often described by his fellow citizens: “egoism, pride, aloofness, guile,” according to sociologist and historian Raymond Aron; “empiricism, intuition, flexibility of mind if not of soul,” according to one of the most perceptive of his biographers, Jean Lacouture.

From 1962 until his reelection as president in 1965, de Gaulle used the European Economic Community (EEC; now part of the European Union) to serve French interests, especially agricultural interests. France’s participation in the supranational North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) was progressively withdrawn, because de Gaulle’s policy for France was one of “national independence” and of international cooperation based only on agreements between nation-states. This was the main theme of his presidential campaign in 1965. On December 21 he was reelected, though only on the second ballot, after facing a surprisingly strong challenge from the Socialist Franƈois Mitterrand. On March 7, 1966, de Gaulle announced France’s withdrawal from the integrated military command of NATO but not from the alliance.

During the remainder of his second term as president, de Gaulle turned his attention increasingly to wider fields. He had already begun a policy of “détente and cooperation” with countries behind the Iron Curtain by encouraging trade and cultural relations with the Soviet Union and the countries of eastern Europe and by recognizing the People’s Republic of China in January 1964. As a solution for the Vietnam War, he advocated a policy of neutrality for all nations concerned, based on a negotiated peace of which a necessary preliminary was to be the withdrawal of all U.S. troops from Vietnam. These activities, together with visits to Canada, the Far East, and all of Latin America, formed part of a policy that aimed at increasing the influence of France, first in French-speaking countries or countries that shared some bond derived from a common attachment to Latin culture, then in Europe, which, in his view, would sooner or later extend beyond the boundaries of the EEC or the division into Western and Eastern blocs, and finally in the world, where he foresaw the gradual dissolution of the two great blocs.

Circumstances worked against his success. He felt obliged to take up attitudes that were generally interpreted as anti-American. His theory of “desatellization,” the progressive loosening of the Soviet hold on the countries of eastern Europe, was brutally invalidated by the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. Moreover, there was no evidence that France carried any real weight with the countries that it hoped to influence. As the political and economic crisis of May 1968 revealed, France had neither the internal cohesion nor the financial resources to play the role of leader in what de Gaulle called “Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals.”

His strength had been in his appeal for unity against a common enemy—in 1940, Germany; in 1958, subversion and civil disorder. In the students’ and workers’ revolt of May 1968, the enemy was once again subversion and civil disorder, but the rapid collapse of the revolt and the divisions within the left that it revealed made de Gaulle seem less indispensable than in the past. The solution to the underlying causes of the revolt required the patient negotiation of a government rather than leadership by a man of destiny. A broadcast on May 30 brought a massive demonstration of support and a landslide Gaullist victory in the subsequent election, but the victory was for peace and normality rather than for the president and his policies.

When in April 1969 de Gaulle called once again for a referendum, it was not clear whether he really wanted to remain in power. The referendum, calling for the acceptance of regional reorganization and a reform of the Senate, was presented to voters, as other referenda had been, as a choice between acceptance of the measures (though the second was generally unpopular) or of his own resignation. The diplomatic methods that had been welcomed during his first term as assertions of France’s claim to equality with and influence among the great powers now created great unease. His advocacy of neutrality on Vietnam in 1966 was widely interpreted as an expression of personal anti-Americanism. On his visit to Canada in 1967, he seemed actively to encourage French Canadian separatism. His declarations of neutrality in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war seemed to show a pro-Arab bias. France had not formally withdrawn from NATO, and the so-called independent nuclear deterrent that he sought was neither independent nor within France’s means. The question “After de Gaulle, who?” was answered by the president himself when he dismissed Georges Pompidou in 1968 after a record six years as prime minister. This left Pompidou free to present himself as a credible and acceptable successor to de Gaulle.

On April 28, 1969, following his defeat in the referendum, de Gaulle resigned and returned to Colombey-les-deux-Églises to retire permanently and to resume writing his memoirs. There he died of a heart attack the following year. His aims and actions as president have drawn more exegesis and speculation than those of any other French statesman.