Tuesday, July 13, 2010

Fenby on De Gaulle


Jonathan Fenby yesterday marked a lesser known De Gaulle anniversary. The year is 1958, De Gaulle is back in power, and Algiers is the center of French attention. Fenby writes:

"The decisive moment came when de Gaulle, in military uniform, went on television to demonstrate his mastery of the new medium. “Well, my dear and old country, here we are again facing a heavy test,” he said. Insisting that self-determination was the only way ahead, he called on the army to reject even passive association with the insurrection and instructed it to re-establish public order. If the state bowed before the challenge it faced, “France would be no more than a poor, broken toy floating on an ocean of uncertainty,” he warned.

Within 15 minutes of the General’s face fading from the screen, 40 army units in Algeria declared their loyalty. The men at the barricades were persuaded to leave their stronghold; the insurrectionary leaders were either detained or escaped to Spain.

The defeat of the military revolt was the first time that the republican authority of Paris had been asserted over the pieds noirs who had helped to bring down the Fourth Republic. De Gaulle’s firmness and rhetoric – aided, it must be said, by the fumbling of the rebels – established the primacy of the state."


I don't know much about De Gaulle or French history for that matter, but this article was an interesting read. It was also an opportunity to post a picture of a De Gaulle memorial that I took in Paris :)

7 comments:

  1. Then eleven years later he went on TV and gave an eight minute speech was humiliated at the polls.

    Anyway, there was more to DeGaulle's efforts re: Algeria than merely a speech; there was a lot of violence as well (e.g., the 1961 massacre of pro-FLN marchers in Paris).

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  2. Right - it's mentioned in the article. Well, not the 1961 massacre, but the operations in Algeria.

    What was De Gaulle's role in the massacre though? I didn't know anything about it so I looked it up, and he doesn't seem very closely involved.

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  3. Well, his government was certainly involved in the cover-up of the event. And his government would have known about the deaths leading up to the event and following it. It isn't as if Papon's efforts were some mystery to De Gaulle, so even if there was no "direct order" by the President, De Gaulle remained hip deep on these matters.

    We also have to keep in mind too just how central Papon had been to De Gaulle gaining power in 1958 ... so Papon wasn't ancillary figure in his regime, he was quite central to it (at least until he became too much of a political liability after the Barka kidnapping).

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  4. Right, I'm not trying to say he had nothing to do with this. I'm just not sure how much of it is chain-of-command liability vs. genuine moral culpability.

    It's like Abu Gharib. Ultimatley that's going to have to fall on Bush and Rumsfeld to a certain extent, but I'd have greater concerns about the commanding officers overseeing it. Guantanamo is a different story, and I consider Bush to have full moral culpability for a prison he probably knew in much greater detail. This is all speculation of course - I'm not privy to what he knew. I don't know of the massacre was more of an Abu Gharib or more of a Guantanamo.

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  5. Well, it would have been something hard to escape his notice. De Gaulle and Gaullism was Jacobin in nature after all.

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  6. Escape his notice??? Well certainly not.

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  7. It would be interesting to read a biography of Papon - to see how independent he was of De Gaulle's regime. It wouldn't surprise me if De Gaulle had ordered him to engage in a "cracking heads" policy. I mean, assuming that De Gaulle knew about Papon's history during WWII (when Papon actively engaged in the deportation of Jews under the Vichy regime), De Gaulle could have presumably surmised he was the sort of person who wouldn't have a problem undertaking such a task.

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