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  • Professor John Merriman: This is all relevant.

  • What happened at Villiers-le-Bel was that you got

  • your basic cop car, coming along,

  • and it wasn't rolling aggressively,

  • it was about fifty kilometers an hour, and these two young

  • North-African extraction youths, without helmets,

  • didn't yield to the car. They were on a scooter,

  • sort of essentially a motorcycle, not a big one but a

  • scooter. And, so, they hit the car on

  • the left side and unfortunately they were both killed.

  • And then the police stayed a bit and made calls but the calls

  • that they made were more, "we have something spinning out

  • of control," it's not about how are these two kids who--and you

  • see, they left it there for two

  • days, they circled it all away. So, you still see these little

  • guys' tennis shoes and you see--you can see traces of their

  • having expired. And, so, Villiers-le-Bel,

  • which is about eighteen kilometers north of Paris--it's

  • near Roissy, it's near Sarcelles,

  • where there was a lot of trouble before,

  • it's near Gonesse; it's in the Val d'Oise--went up

  • in flames basically, and unfortunately a lot of

  • people were hurt in the fighting.

  • And yesterday they burned, somebody stupidly burned the

  • library, and the library is not associated with the

  • flics, with the cops,

  • it's not associated with the State even, it is the municipal

  • library where lots of kids go and study in the municipal

  • library. And, so, this was just la

  • connerie, this is not possible to do

  • stuff like that. But, anyway,

  • part of the problem is that Sarkozy denigrated the people in

  • the suburbs as racaille, as scum, by implication,

  • that--and was Minister of the Interior during the big

  • troubles, a couple of years ago;

  • which I'm going to talk about on Wednesday,

  • the troubles, which started in

  • Clichy-sous-Bois. But there's a lot of--in

  • Toulouse where there had been trouble two years ago,

  • now it's happening in Toulouse, too, but I didn't--I'll watch

  • it this afternoon. It's a problem,

  • it's going to be a big problem for awhile.

  • And what makes it a little more scary is that this wasn't an

  • incident, where there have been incidents where the police

  • are--the police systematically control people of color,

  • systematically, in France, systematically.

  • I go through Barbès-Rochechouart,

  • which is a metro stop famous for the first place that

  • somebody shot and killed a German officer during Vichy

  • and--or the Gare de Lyon. I was in the Gare de Lyon,

  • not the other day but at the end of November--or for that

  • matter after Sarkozy was elected;

  • you go to the Gare de Lyon metro stop and all of a sudden

  • you turn the corner and then you've got ten policemen there,

  • controlling people. I've lived--I've spent half my

  • life in France for the last thirty years.

  • I have never been controlled, not once, not once.

  • And I've been with people going through, and you turn the

  • corner, and all of a sudden you've got all the police there.

  • And who do they pick out? They don't pick out whites

  • carrying little academic briefcases, they pick out

  • everybody, practically, who is young and who is not

  • white. And so this rubs people the

  • wrong way, to say the least, and it's part of the way this

  • works in the suburbs. And, so, this incident,

  • which involved a police car, was not coming in and sort of

  • saying "up against the mall MF" and all this but,

  • "let's see your papers." Because that's what happens,

  • and I've seen that happen. It was just unfortunately these

  • two policemen--who weren't doing anything wrong,

  • they were just--it was a banal trip through a banal suburb--

  • happened to hit these two kids who were not wearing helmets and

  • so they were killed. But this is--who knows what's

  • going to happen in this. But this is part of when you

  • see La Haine, hate, you see--that's the best

  • translation simply of it is hatred or hate.

  • And to understand how people in the suburbs feel you have to

  • understand the relationship between both--and I'm going to

  • do this again, in more detail;

  • I better get to what I'm doing today.

  • But that it's not just young people with not much of a

  • future, it also is, mostly has to do with

  • under-privileged and under-appreciated minorities

  • pitted against the CRS, the national kind of military

  • police, as well as the municipal police.

  • And of course what the government of Chirac did was

  • take away all the money virtually for voluntary

  • associations that are bridges to helping integrate people into

  • the communities in which they live and into the State in which

  • they live. But ce n'est pas

  • évident, comme on dit en

  • français, it's just--oh,

  • well, there we go. How did we get on that?

  • We got on that because it's important to talk about.

  • Allez. So, today I'm going to talk

  • about Charles de Gaulle. In November 1970,

  • ça passe vite, les temps,

  • I was a student in Paris, just a little older than you,

  • and living in an eleven-franc-a-night hotel,

  • on rue Monsieur le Prince--that was about two dollars a night.

  • My hotel room wasn't worth that, actually,

  • but it was kind of an interesting place to live

  • for--again, I was living in Limoges for a

  • lot of the year too. I went to the Archives one day

  • about--get there early, which I always do,

  • and this little man who was a World War Two veteran who had

  • lost most of his arm in the war, who would check my ID,

  • but he knew me so there was no problem--my wife used to come in

  • looking for me, when she was my wife,

  • carrying our baby and the groceries, and it's all very

  • cont racté,

  • very informal; it's not that way any more.

  • And he said, "we're going to close because

  • the general, il est mort"--the general is dead.

  • And Charles de Gaulle died, had died.

  • And I, I think, infuriated my Gaullist friend

  • by saying that he died of boredom watching French TV;

  • but he was off in Colombey-les-Deux-Eglises,

  • and he had died at age--he must've just been eighty;

  • wasn't he eighty when he died, do you remember?

  • You don't remember, but anyway I think he was

  • eighty when he died. And, so, later my Gaullist

  • friend, who's a lawyer, a Parisian lawyer,

  • called me up and said, "look, why don't we go down to

  • Notre Dame and go to the Mass?" De Gaulle didn't want to have a

  • Mass, and I didn't particularly want to go down to Notre Dame

  • and go to the Mass for Charles de Gaulle,

  • but he said that it'll be--it's a historical event,

  • we should be there, you should see it.

  • And so I went down, we went down at three in the

  • morning and waited in line, and then they'd flown in all

  • these people. Haile Selassie was there,

  • that was kind of amazing to see Haile Selassie,

  • and the odious Richard Nixon was there and all these leaders,

  • with rather minimum security. This was not in a high security

  • time. You could see people who were

  • carrying machineguns up on the towers, you could see people in

  • the cathedral up--I was about the only person anyone saw get

  • frisked, going in.

  • They looked at me and said we want to check you out;

  • so they checked me out, with the long hair and all

  • that. But we got in there,

  • and it was a moment of--as a moment of history,

  • and it was something to see. His influence on French life

  • and the memory of French life can hardly--the collective

  • memory, of collective memory in French

  • life, can hardly be underestimated;

  • yet it was so long ago that he died, and the party that bore

  • his name disappeared, that even if someone like

  • Sarkozy or, before him, Jacques Chirac,

  • would go to Colombey-les-Deux-Eglises,

  • this village in the Haute-Marne, in the east of

  • France, to have their picture taken in front of his tomb with

  • the Croix de Lorraine--de Gaulle seems like a long time ago.

  • But what he did in 1958 is of course to rescue the French

  • State and to define, in his own personage,

  • a certain idea of France that he represented.

  • And to borrow a Catholic image, de Gaulle who was born in

  • Lille, right near, as I said the other day,

  • right near the fortress--Lille is a pretty Catholic town--he

  • was not himself a practicing religious man,

  • but I suppose it's a religious image that I somehow have

  • retained in the back of my mind from the days at a good old

  • Jesuit high school in Portland, Oregon, that he saw himself as

  • the mystical body of France, that somehow the whole,

  • that is his body, his personage,

  • his very being, was bigger than all of the

  • parts that constituted the body of France,

  • and that he represented France with his very existence,

  • and that this was how he wanted to be remembered.

  • And when he leaves power in 1969, after a rather obscure

  • election, plebiscite really, that that image still was

  • retained. There are really three elements

  • that represented his image and the myth of Charles de Gaulle

  • after World War Two. That he was the providential

  • figure who through his own determination had saved France

  • and its honor after the blowout of May/June 1940;

  • that as his voice crackled over the BBC on the 18th of June,

  • 1940, a date that's still commemorated every year when

  • there's a Gaullist in power and a mayor of France such as Chirac

  • there's always a little event to commemorate that;

  • that he had restored the integrity of France.

  • My friend Bob Paxton, as I reminded you the other

  • day, argued thattain might have saved the French

  • State but he did not save the French nation;

  • he destroyed it by destroying liberty, fraternity,

  • equality, and what that means. That Charles de Gaulle had

  • restored the integrity of France, had restored the

  • sovereignty of French over their own political existence,

  • which is obvious, and the republic itself,

  • by being involved in the creation of the Fourth Republic,

  • but then repudiating the way it was established,

  • wanting centralized executive authority and all of that,

  • and then would go off pouting to Colombey-les-Deux-Eglises.

  • That he'd then he'd reunified the nation after the civil war

  • that was Vichy. But, again, with a Gaullist

  • twist is that everybody had basically resisted,

  • or wanted to resist, that they were always ready

  • with the gun nearby to go and kill the German when they could

  • and to restore France, and that hardly anyone had

  • collaborated. So, this was sort of the

  • Gaullist take on this. And that he had restored the

  • centralized state--not after World War Two,

  • because the Fourth Republic was this sort of swinging door

  • ministry; it's rather like the Third

  • Republic--which as in the case of the Third Republic gave the

  • illusion that French political life was more unstable than it

  • was, because the deputies of the

  • Fourth Republic, like the deputies of the Third

  • Republic, it was a club where the same

  • people were re-elected time and time again from the same

  • constituencies. But de Gaulle's thing was that

  • the only form of government that could restore the integrity of

  • France and end the factions of parliamentary quarrels,

  • and quarreling, and he hated the communists,

  • of course, was a strongly centralized government.

  • And for that he had to wait, as you now know,

  • until cinquante-huit, until 1958,

  • with a constitution written for him by Michel Debré,

  • who personified Gaullism itself,

  • and whose son is an important figure in contemporary France.

  • This is very important for de Gaulle's view of France,

  • is that he had freed France, in his mind,

  • from the anarchy of political parties that were quarreling,

  • a parliamentary government that he didn't think had worked,

  • that was incapable of restoring the "grandeur" of France--a word

  • to which he returned constantly; more about that in

  • awhile--strengthening the French state under a new constitution

  • that--written by Debré--that gave France a

  • strong executive with a president who would be in power

  • for seven years, and who had strong executive

  • authority. Now, those of you who know

  • anything about France before 1871, if this doesn't sound like

  • Napoleon, both N-I, Napoleon the First,

  • and N-III, Napoleon the Third--it's an obvious thing to

  • say, but it's still true--that

  • in--there's no need you should know this, but some of you

  • do--1799 on the 18th of Brumaire,

  • Napoleon, with the help of the wily Abbe Sieyes,

  • the priest, Sieyes, who wrote "What is the Third

  • Estate," overthrow the Assembly.

  • Napoleon had a bit of a faltering and his brother Lucien

  • helped him out there, because he lost--the only time

  • in his life he really lost his courage--they overthrow the

  • government and impose a consulate in which Napoleon

  • becomes the first council and finally snatches the crown,

  • it is thought, from the Pope and crowns

  • himself emperor. And Napoleon adopts what would

  • become the most Gaullist political strategy,

  • shared by that of governments of North Korea,

  • among other dictatorships, that is the plebiscite,

  • where you ask people with a cagy question,

  • "Do you agree"-- for example, Napoleon III,

  • just before the fall of the whole mess at the end of the

  • 1860s, in 1870 there was a plebiscite,

  • "Do you agree with the reforms that have been undertaken by our

  • glorious Emperor?" et cetera, et cetera.

  • If you write "no," you're saying, "well,

  • I don't really like reforms," and so therefore do you say

  • "yes" because you like reforms or "yes" because you like

  • Napoleon III? And, so, naturally the

  • plebiscite is like a North Korean plebiscite where

  • ninety-nine percent of the people say oui--that's

  • what Napoleon III did after he overthrew the Second Republic.

  • So, there are strong continuities between Napoleon

  • and the idea of a centralized state overcoming the sort of

  • quarreling factions of France. And Napoleon I put an end to

  • what was called, rather colorfully and an

  • unfortunate phrase, but "the war of the chamber

  • pots" that was the French Directory, before this whole

  • thing is overthrown. And, so, there's an appeal to

  • the nation. And Napoleon was one of the

  • originators of an aggressive kind of nationalism.

  • But Napoleon was perceived as somebody on the Left.

  • Napoleon III, before he was Napoleon III,

  • in 1841, wrote a little pamphlet called "Property,"

  • about property, called "The Extinction of

  • Pauperism"; and the idea that somehow the

  • caring State cares about all people in France and that all

  • people in France find part of their identity in the notion of

  • being French. And as you already know from

  • things we've talked about, that part of nationalism was

  • this sort of aggressive carrying of the French language into

  • corners in which it was not spoken,

  • or spoken only as a second way of speaking, language,

  • dialect, patois, et cetera,

  • et cetera. So, the idea of a national will

  • represented in the body of a strong executive authority is a

  • Napoleonic idea that became part of the political existence of de

  • Gaulle, and ultimately of Gaullism.

  • But you had to have the idea of it being ratified by the

  • people--thus plebiscites. Now, Pétain,

  • the difference is thattain in World War Two,

  • the "national revolution," in quotes, with the

  • Marshall--again the military connection, Napoleon,

  • tain, as he saw it,

  • and de Gaulle--it was never ratified by any kind of popular

  • vote because it was an even more authoritarian government under

  • Vichy. The 1920s and the '30s,

  • and the first half of the 1940s, was the wave of

  • authoritarianism that cost the lives of so many millions of

  • people, I need not remind you.

  • And that Bonapartism, as in Gaullism,

  • involved the kind of stamp of popular approval seen in the

  • plebiscites of 1958, and in subsequent plebiscites.

  • And he goes out in 1969, after he loses--they lose the

  • plebiscite. On January 18th--no,

  • I must've written this wrong, it must be the dix-huit de

  • juin, it must be June 18th,

  • 1940--he says "I"--he often said "we," the royal "we,"

  • but in this case he said "I," because he wasn't yet running

  • the show--"I, General de Gaulle,

  • French soldier and leader, am conscious that I am speaking

  • in the name of France"--that I represent France;

  • again the mystical body. Michel Debré--again

  • d-e-b-r-e--who wrote this constitution of '58,

  • said that the only chance for French democracy,

  • if that term may be used, is to have a republican

  • monarch, and that was the Gaullist view of de Gaulle.

  • And he resigns on the 20th of June, 1946, and the Fourth

  • Republic comes into existence without him.

  • Now, when he returns to power, in '58, it was after--because

  • of the chaos of what was happening in Algeria that

  • republican institutions seemed to have been discredited.

  • And, so, he has the upper hand there to identify himself with

  • the strongly centralized French state.

  • It was clear in 1958, as it had been clear with

  • Napoleon--but this is a different case--Napoleon I,

  • that it was only de Gaulle at that moment who could impose

  • discipline on the French Army; thus the howls of betrayal when

  • the other generals say he's going to let Algeria become

  • free. And thus the sense of betrayal,

  • and they try to kill him. And, so, but for all of his

  • verbal-- his respect for and endorsement of popular

  • sovereignty, but his tool of State is really

  • often the plebiscite, which you can argue is sort of

  • a sham tool of democracy. What he does--and reflecting

  • the fact that the 1880s and the 1890s are the period of mass

  • politics when the first political parties are created.

  • Napoleon I and Napoleon III did not create political parties.

  • Political parties did not exist in France;

  • they existed, the Whigs and the Tories

  • existed in England already, but that is a long,

  • complicated story that starts with the run up to the English

  • Civil War at the middle of the seventeenth century.

  • But he creates a political party that will support him,

  • and his support, the people,

  • a lot of the people who were Gaullists in the late 1940s were

  • part of what is called the MRP, or whatever,

  • the big mass Catholic political party which was extremely

  • conservative. But he--the essence of this was

  • strongly centralized authority. Did he consciously pattern

  • himself after the Napoleons, or after Boulanger for that

  • matter? He'd been born in 1890,

  • in Lille, but brought up in--I think he was born in Lille,

  • I'm sure I've seen this house in which I thought he was born,

  • in Lille, but he was brought up in Paris.

  • He loved the Arc de Triomphe and he loved Invalides,

  • which is where Napoleon is buried.

  • I've got to just give you one small story, which I don't think

  • I've related. There is a famous American

  • tennis player who the first time this tennis player was in the

  • French Open, which is sponsored the Banque

  • Nationale de Paris, they took this tennis player on

  • a tour of Paris, and that tour got kind of old

  • for this particular player; after about an hour and a half

  • this person had seen enough. And then finally they said,

  • some journalists said, "what do you like best about

  • what you saw in Paris?" and the tennis player said,

  • "Oh, I really liked the tomb with the little dead dude;"

  • and the little dead dude is of course Napoleon,

  • and that image is still… Napoleon's tomb,

  • which you see from above, you can't see in the tomb,

  • it's not like when you're looking at Lenin or something

  • but--is a massive tourist draw, and that is something that's

  • always happened, that's always been the case

  • since then. He was a lecturer at the

  • Military College of Saint-Cyr, near Paris, and he lectured on

  • Napoleon's military campaigns and particularly that of 1805.

  • When he organized the French Free Forces in North Africa in

  • '41 he referred to Napoleon's campaigns that he'd studied very

  • carefully. But he knew also that because

  • the French Constitution had been written--that is the Third

  • Republic, end of the Fourth Republic--had

  • been written reflecting the fear of people like Napoleons,

  • the Napoleons, of Caesarism,

  • that he realized that that was always a possibility and always

  • spoke highly of things like popular sovereignty.

  • He always used a kind of appeals to the French masses

  • that Napoleon himself had done so effectively--more about that

  • in a minute, and his sort of plunging into

  • the crowds, to the horror of his guards.

  • Something happened when Gorbachev came to the United

  • States, and Gorbachev was such an impressive person and such an

  • under-appreciated great man. And Gorbachev just shocked his

  • guards by getting out of the big, black limousine near the

  • mall in Washington and sort of plunging and giving high-fives,

  • the Russian equivalents of high-fives, to people in the

  • crowd, where the guards were just scared to death because we

  • had lost a Kennedy and all this, two Kennedys,

  • indeed, and because of security issues.

  • And de Gaulle who had survived these various assassination

  • attempts, and one in which, as I said, just this huge man,

  • this car which is riddled by machineguns, a couple of guys

  • firing in Clamart, and he escapes absolutely

  • unscathed. Napoleon was only wounded three

  • times, very lightly. Napoleon seemed to have this

  • view that comes out of saintly romantic battling figures in the

  • medieval times that they were--that God had made them

  • immune to physical danger, and that if somebody fired in

  • the seventeenth century a bullet at such a person that they could

  • catch the bullet, as if Superman or some

  • ridiculous video thing, catch them in their teeth.

  • But part of this is the popular appeal of this man who was full

  • of famous things that he said. But he never intended it as

  • witticisms; the man had virtually no sense

  • of humor. He's a cynic but a very smart

  • man. But he's probably best

  • remembered for saying, "how can you possibly run a

  • country"--I don't think he used the word rule,

  • that would've been a mistake, that would've been lapsing to

  • the royal we, which he used constantly--"How

  • can you run a country that has 268 different kinds of cheese?

  • It's all so complex." In fact, there are many more

  • than 268 kinds of cheese; there's probably 268 different

  • kinds of picodons, which are small goats' cheeses

  • produced in the southeast of France and in other places.

  • But what organized all this stuff together in his thinking

  • is that France cannot be France without grandeur,

  • without grandeur. So, one of the compelling

  • aspects of his existence was that how you keep a power,

  • that is no longer really a great power, in a world that had

  • been divided among two great powers,

  • how you keep a diminished great power a great power,

  • how do you do that? So, there were two ways,

  • very vehemently anti-communist through the whole thing,

  • but more realistic than the Americans, always more realistic

  • than the Americans--and this we'll tie together in a minute.

  • Two ways: one is that you maintain this forceful

  • independence vis-à-vis the Americans and the Soviets.

  • The clash of these two civilizations,

  • both with their monumental exaggerations and both with

  • their monumental problems; the Americans' problems less

  • bloody than the traditions in the Soviet Union--how do you do

  • that? So, you become independent,

  • you leave NATO, you throw the Americans out;

  • thus these huge airbases that were once full of American

  • planes, full of American Air Force people and soldiers in

  • Chateauroux and all these places--I mentioned this

  • before--now empty, just big parking lots

  • essentially. You can still see them all over

  • the place. Or Lyon, there's another good

  • one. You're independent,

  • and you insist on having the force de frappe,

  • force, like force, and then de,

  • d-e, and then frappe, f-r-a-p-p-e;

  • and frappe, it sounds like something that's

  • served at Coffee Too or Starbucks, but it is the nuclear

  • capacity. And, so, France is going to be

  • independent, it's going to have nuclear capacity.

  • The Americans had the atomic bomb, the Soviet Union had the

  • atomic bomb. The Americans had used an

  • atomic bomb. The Israelis probably did not

  • yet have the atomic bomb but soon would, and India would

  • later and the Pakistanis and as you know the Chinese,

  • as well. So, that leads to point number

  • two, that is by being independent and by being French,

  • that you maintain your influence in places even as they

  • are being decolonized--places like Mali,

  • for example, or Senegal, or ex-Zaire,

  • the Congo, which was the awful Leopold's private territory

  • before the Belgian parliament took it over at the end of the

  • nineteenth century, the beginning of the twentieth

  • century, because of just the massacres, the slaughter of

  • local people by sort of Belgian mercenary types,

  • and all of this; that these places,

  • that even after Algeria, and before that Morocco and

  • Tunisia, become independent that the

  • influence of la belle France in places like Vietnam,

  • after the French leave, because of French civilization,

  • the civilizing mission, the French language-- Lebanon,

  • another very good example, French influence in Lebanon,

  • terribly, terribly important. And that this kind of

  • influence, a cultural influence and a political influence of

  • being an honest broker between these two big colossal powers

  • will help accentuate France's existence as a great power,

  • continued to exist as a great power.

  • But there was a contradiction there because France was no

  • longer a great power, but wanted to be a great power.

  • And, so, that was essential in the way that de Gaulle viewed

  • France's role and personally his role;

  • that France would maintain its influence in what they called in

  • those days the Third World, tiers monde,

  • that were--had just been freed from the colonial imperial

  • experience but were economically disadvantaged.

  • And that France's historical mission of carrying

  • civilization, French civilization,

  • the civilizing mission, et cetera, et cetera,

  • would continue in that context. Now, you even saw this very

  • recently in the case of the Bulgarian nurses who had been in

  • Libya accused of--it's a terribly complicated case--of

  • infecting Libyan children with HIV,

  • and who had been condemned to death and had been in prison for

  • I don't remember how long. And one of the first things

  • that Sarkozy does is he sends his wife, who's no longer his

  • wife, to Libya to use the influence,

  • that old French influence, in the Middle East to obtain

  • the release of these Bulgarian nurses.

  • And indeed they were able to pull that off.

  • I think one of the nurses was Palestinian but I think the

  • other ones were Bulgarian, I'm sure they were Bulgarian;

  • I'm not sure about the Palestinian but I think so.

  • And it works. But this is an idea that we can

  • be there, we can intervene in these cases and get things

  • happened because of that. And no one--if you travel in

  • Africa and in Francophone countries, nobody should have

  • any illusion about the continued influence of France in these

  • places; and it is very,

  • very important, and this is something that de

  • Gaulle believed very much. He feared the domination of

  • Europe and France by Britain and the United States,

  • using NATO as a tool. And, so, you can argue now that

  • Europe, quote/unquote Europe, the European Union,

  • the European community and all this stuff, that the basis of

  • this lies certainly in what would've seemed in the 1920s and

  • the '30s, or for that matter the 1880s

  • and '90s, a horribly unusual alliance between Germany and

  • France. And de Gaulle moves in that

  • direction. And, so, that is a way

  • of--working against is the wrong term--but sort of circumventing

  • the kind of domination of the U.S.

  • and of Britain in all of this. And what he helps do--and this

  • is very important--is it ends all that animosity between

  • Germany and France. I can remember going up to the

  • Normandy beaches, the Norman beaches,

  • and try waiting in there--imagine all these people

  • shooting at you on the 6th of June,

  • 1944 when you go to Omaha Beach, or Utah Beach,

  • or one of these places, and it's full of Americans

  • going there; it's full of very old Americans

  • going there, to see where they had lost a lot of friends.

  • But I remember going there with German plates--this is in the

  • early 1970s--and still getting stares and insults,

  • that I could understand perfectly well;

  • they thought we were German, and we weren't,

  • we were your age and just kind of traveling around,

  • and sleeping on beaches, and eating a little,

  • and drinking some wine along the way,

  • and all that stuff. But de Gaulle helped put an end

  • to that, and now if you ask almost anybody,

  • if you ask one of the Germans going into Strasbourg to buy

  • foie gras, or all the French going over to

  • Germany to buy what is slightly cheaper gasoline,

  • this is an alliance, and a cornerstone of Europe,

  • particularly given the attitude of the British and all the

  • anxieties that they have about losing their integrity,

  • national integrity, of losing the pound and all

  • that stuff. And, so, de Gaulle helped make

  • that possible. He never forgot the humiliation

  • of France having been excluded from the Allied conferences at

  • Yalta and Potsdam. You've all seen those pictures

  • of Stalin with Churchill and sometimes Roosevelt as well.

  • But France was not invited. Both Roosevelt and Churchill

  • just hated de Gaulle's guts, they hated his arrogance.

  • And he was not a person who lacked confidence,

  • and he was not rigolo, he was not a good-time guy.

  • His own family, by the way, his own family

  • vous-vous-ed him, his children did.

  • They didn't use tu they used vous--that's

  • amazing. And they hated him,

  • they had contempt for him. And de Gaulle never forgot

  • those personal humiliations and the humiliations that la

  • France, great power,

  • was not invited to participate in essentially the fate of

  • Europe. And, so, that leads to 1966,

  • France withdrawing from NATO by forcing it to transfer its

  • headquarters from Paris to Bruxelles,

  • to Brussels, and these army and air force

  • bases in France were closed; and armed forces radio was

  • moved away, so it became more difficult to listen to football

  • games on armed forces radio because you had to get them from

  • Frankfurt, which is an extraordinarily

  • minor point. And again he insisted on the

  • development of an arsenal that was nuclear.

  • And he angered the U.S. government by refusing to

  • support the U.S. policies in Vietnam.

  • And of course the French had already seen how stupid policies

  • lead to bad results. But the Americans did not see

  • that, for a very long time, until 70,000 American soldiers

  • and God-knows how many people in Vietnam died in all of this.

  • He outraged--and I remember this;

  • I wasn't in Quebec--but he went to Quebec on a state visit,

  • and he suddenly blurts out, "long live free Quebec!"

  • And, so, this caused all sorts of problems.

  • This was in the late-- it was about 1967, if I remember

  • correctly. Why free Quebec?

  • Because Quebec is nouvelle France, and that's where you

  • had 60,000 French men, women, and children living.

  • At the time there were 2.5 million English people living in

  • what was the colonies in the U.S., and a very one-sided war.

  • But again the idea that if Quebec is free,

  • if it's independent--my own personal view is it ought to be

  • independent; ça n'a rien à

  • voir avec. But it's just my feeling,

  • but I don't know enough about it to say that's a good idea,

  • but I have the same kind of cultural feelings that he does

  • about it. But this is not what you do,

  • you do not go on a state visit and suddenly announce "long live

  • Quebec!" Americans, this is the same

  • thing, if somebody came from, I don't know,

  • a Serb ambassador or an Italian prime minister suddenly arrives

  • and says, "long live free New Mexico and

  • Texas!" or something like that--people

  • didn't view it very well. But although he was vehemently

  • anti-communist, he did not want--he saw himself

  • as again this honest broker in negotiating between these

  • powers. His legacy were of these

  • imperatives that he had; they were backed by deeds or at

  • least attempts to restore the grandeur of France,

  • its efficient, kind of active independence,

  • as I guess Stanley Hoffmann called it that once.

  • And this diverged from other parts of the French Right--Le

  • Figaro magazine, for example,

  • which is always just almost comically pro-American on every

  • issue. The French Right couldn't--what

  • de Gaulle did is he took the nationalism of Napoleons,

  • the Napoleons, which was a nationalism

  • associated with the general liberal Left--the State will do

  • good things for people--he transforms that in the evolution

  • that you see in the Third Republic,

  • the nationalism, moving to the nationalism of

  • the Right, into the equivalent of the Sacred Union of World War

  • One, into a nationalism,

  • fundamentally a nationalism of the Right in France.

  • And part of that, to make a long story short,

  • as you already have seen, is based upon his

  • anti-communism. But at the same time you have

  • all this business about grandeur and glory, et cetera,

  • et cetera--grandeur more than glory;

  • but inattention to--even at the end of what's called the

  • glorious thirty years, the French economy takes off,

  • that you've read about--inattention to how you

  • modernize France, how you make it more

  • economically competitive, and what do you do about the

  • education system, the university system in

  • particular? And that would come crashing

  • down on his head in 1968. So, his deeds,

  • his legacy in--I've already said I think what there is to

  • say about the practical consequences of his legacy.

  • But he did, France's influence did remain, has remained in the

  • world, which I think is a very good thing.

  • But the most, the greatest legacy that he

  • left is probably his style, that of the monarchical

  • president, the monarchial president,

  • the king of the republic, the idea that he represented

  • France in a way that the Sun King had represented France,

  • towering over France, and that overriding the

  • interests of those he considered to be talkers,

  • mere posers or talkers, including technocrats,

  • the kinds of people who had emerged in part out of World War

  • Two and out of the Fourth Republic.

  • And, so, he left unsolved the question of how you educate

  • France for a new society, how you train and modernize

  • people. What do you do with the

  • poisonous relations between a very powerful patronat,

  • that is employers, and a working class that in the

  • 1960s was still extremely influenced by the CGT,

  • the Confédération Général du

  • Travail, and by the Communist Party?

  • So, there were contradictions in all of this,

  • the idea that France is a great power when France still--France

  • wasn't yet a great power. The idea that France can be

  • independent and therefore maintain itself as a great power

  • by intervening, in terms of its cultural

  • influence, its political influence in the Third World and

  • that sort of thing. And the reality,

  • when push came to shove, that there were two great

  • powers. So, it kind of,

  • the contradictions are there. He said over and over again

  • that he was not of the Left nor of the Right;

  • he was above the Left or the Right--he used the "above" word,

  • the word "above" all the time. He said "je suis un homme de

  • la guerre de quatorze/dix-huit"--I'm a

  • man of the War of 1914-1918; he was wounded on Belgian

  • Bridge in Dinant, as I said the other day.

  • And that was the Sacred Union, when in the interests of France

  • these quarreling fragments would give up their quarrels with each

  • other and would rally around big France--that France's historical

  • mission was so especially said on the 11th of December,

  • 1969, "I don't want to repose, I don't want to even triumph,

  • I want to bring people together."

  • He saw his own party as being above these.

  • He said that the parties--in 1965--he said parties are

  • organizations constituted to show off particular tendencies

  • and to support the interests of such and such categories of

  • people, or interests,

  • or desires, and all this stuff, time and time again.

  • But he wasn't just someone who was going to pronounce

  • foolishly, revert to the same eventually tired phrases,

  • he was somebody who believed that he could pay particular

  • attention to circumstances. In this he was rather like

  • Bismarck, and saw himself in that way, I think it's possible

  • to argue. In this maybe he saw himself a

  • little bit, though I hate to make the comparison,

  • but maybe with Henry Kissinger a little bit too,

  • in the old days. But one of the results of the

  • way he viewed France is that he didn't really give a damn about

  • the existence of ordinary people.

  • He once said that--he said this literally--"steak

  • frites," that is steak with French fries,

  • "is okay, it's fine, but it does not add up to

  • national ambition"; that's an exact quote.

  • And the business of how do you bring together,

  • how do you retain the importance of a people with 268

  • kinds of cheese, was a part of all of that.

  • And, so, his style was more original than his doctrine.

  • Take the press conference--he used to have press conferences.

  • American presidents often have press conferences,

  • though the current one really doesn't because the questions

  • get too difficult to handle. But de Gaulle wasn't one for

  • press conferences, he hated them,

  • he couldn't stand them. But the press conferences in

  • the old day were orchestrated, they were appearances.

  • They were not a rock concert appearance, but they were

  • appearances nonetheless, in which the questions had been

  • planted. It was rather like FEMA,

  • whatever they called it--did an amazing thing just a couple of

  • weeks in California, they planted--the people in the

  • room weren't reporters they were FEMA employees,

  • and they presented it as a press conference where one guy

  • raised his hand and he said, "why is FEMA doing such a

  • remarkable job this time around?"

  • And then the guy says, "well, I think we're very doing

  • well, thank you for saying that."

  • It turned out that he was an employee of FEMA and there

  • weren't real journalists there. But de Gaulle would do the same

  • thing except he would do it with real journalists;

  • he wouldn't do it with Helen Thomas, who was a wonderful

  • person. I once had her as a guest at

  • the tea in Branford; she was always able to ask the

  • first question--I don't think this is the case

  • anymore--because she was the senior person.

  • But you had real journalists, but they were told what

  • questions to ask, and then he would say--he would

  • give the same kinds of responses that I just said--"steak-frites

  • do not end up with national ambition."

  • At the time of the Algerian War somebody forgot to ask a

  • question about Ben Bella. So, he said--he suddenly looks

  • up and says, "did I hear somebody ask a question about

  • Ben Bella?" And then he gives the response,

  • but he turns and reads a response that had already been

  • written for him, and sometimes by him.

  • And, so, it was the kind of style.

  • So, appearances were important, the idea that somehow this

  • mystical body was connected in a real way to all of you,

  • by national glory. And when he would go to any

  • town, and he liked doing that, he would go and he would say,

  • "as I stand in the shadow of your magnificent cathedral," or

  • "next to your smiling river"--French rivers are always

  • described as smiling, even if they're polluted,

  • by politicians. "I am thinking of you,

  • and seeing you here, here to welcome me,

  • your hearts beating just as mine for France and its grandeur

  • and its civilization, I am reminded that"--and then

  • he launches into his two or three minute bit.

  • And then he is in the big limousine and out of

  • Lussac-les-Deux-Eglises or wherever it is.

  • And it all was like that, where style increasingly

  • overwhelmed substance, and in a man who was extremely

  • elderly, but by no means,

  • by no means senile, not one bit,

  • and who could still treat with contempt anybody who came and

  • told him something he didn't want to hear--but could be

  • charming as well--the stage was set for his departure,

  • as time moved on. And that would swirl around the

  • events of 1968, la revolution

  • manquée, the revolution that didn't

  • really happen in France and involved an awful lot of people

  • of your age. And it's to that,

  • after I hope a glorious weekend, that I will return on

  • Monday.

Professor John Merriman: This is all relevant.

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