De Gaulle Before Paris, by Raymond Aron

[p046] De Gaulle Before Paris, By Robert Aron (translated by Humphrey Hare). Putnam, 35/-. ‘I knew that de Gaulle was intelli- gent, but I never would have thought he could succeed in so splendid an undertaking.’ It is with these words, said to have been used by Marshal Petain when his rule was nearing its end, that Aron aptly closes this account of the ‘Liberation’ of France. His book throws some light on the nature of this ‘splendid undertaking’ and the way in which it was carried out: that is, the assumption by de Gaulle of the historical task of assuring the continuity of the bour- geois state in France. Aron writes less as a sympathiser of de Gaulle or Petain than as one keenly concerned with: the preser- vation of bourgeois institutions in France both from _ working-class revolution and from the encroach- ments of foreign powers. While Petain did his best to preserve the administration during the German Occupation by accepting the neces- sity for collaboration, so, across the Channel, de Gaulle built up an alternative team, prevented the estab- lishment of a military government after the Normandy landings and asserted the historical claims of the French state against the inroads which the Anglo-Saxon -powers may have made. He had, of course, to fight to ensure that it was his team that was recognised and not :a re- furbished Vichy administration. ‘His circle of immediate followers,’ the original Gaullists, saw to it that they received the full fruits of office. The story told in this book of the ousting of the. Vichy sub-prefect of Bayeux is instructive in that respect. De Gaulle’s role is illuminated by the methodical way in which he pre- pared the administrative take-over, but also by the amount of detailed planning carried out by his sub- ordinates. This was certainly no one-man affair. The Gaullist team in London and Algiers -had prepared for every possible eventuality ‘em- bodied in laws and ‘ordinances and they arrived .in France with trunk _ the same class loads of documents, circulars and posters to convey them to the population. They were able to assume, by the time that the landings took place, that they would experi- ence little opposition from their Vichy predecessors, who were also equally anxious to ensure the con- tinuity of the state power. ‘The great merit of Gaullism, considered objectively,’ writes Aron ‘—and every Frenchman must agree about this— is that before it actually came to power it had planned in minute detail the institutions necessary for the avoidance, or at least the limita- tion, of disaster . . . France might easily. have awakened to find herself subject to AMGOT, civil war, or Communism.’ - But Aron forgets in these words facts upon which his narrative from time to time casts a little light, He forgets that ‘every Frenchman’ did not agree about this. He forgets that many Frenchmen had guns in their hands and little desire to return to institutions which ensured the dominance of the bourgeoisie. He should have said that most French bourgeois were agreed about this— those who had flocked into the streets of Paris or Lyons to greet Petain and who, in a matter of weeks, were to show the same enthusiasm for de Gaulle. They recognised in both, at the given moment, the protector of their property and position. The smoothness of the transition should have surprised no one; Pe‘ain and de Gaulle may have had different methods—and whoever was on the winning side was irrevocably bound to eliminate the other physically— but they served interests, the same state ends. . As for the Frenchmen who did not agree, they suffered a mis- leadership and _ betrayal’ which mocked all their hopes and sacrifices. Aron wrongly believes that there was a threat of revolution from -the Communist-led partisans in 1944—or perhaps ‘he only feigns to believe it. Whatever local: militants may have believed, the leaders of the Com- munist Party had no intention of preparing for power. : In -fact, they 207 Other books also accepted the restoration of the bourgeois state—the democratic Fourth Republic—as the natural limitation on their action. That they wanted a position inside this state was, of course, true and fully con- formed with the needs of Soviet foreign policy. Thorez as de Gaulle’s Vice-Premier drumming up more production from the under-nourished miners while black-marketeers waxed fat—the situation which prevailed in 1945-46—was the inevitable outcome of the policy already applied during the ‘Liberation’. The Gaullist moves were at this time precautionary. Specially-trained officers followed the Allied armies to scent out signs of revolution. Wherever a maquis liberated an area by its own actions special action had to be taken to forestall the establishment of popular rule. Out- breaks of popular justice directed against notorious collaborators and racketeers were smeared as ‘mob rule’. On the history of the resistance and its part in the ‘Liberation’ this work gives only a very limited and prejudiced view. After all there was a revolutionary insurrection, open or incipient, in many areas of France in 1944; an insurrection which would have made de Gaulle’s task of maintaining the continuity of bourgeois institutions impossible had it been permitted to develop. If professional military judges, appointed and trained in Algiers, had not rapidly appeared on the scene revolutionary justice (‘whose procedure and sentences bore little relation to jurisprudence’, says Aron) would have prevailed. Like- wise, if Thorez and Duclos, trained in Moscow, had not rapid'y appeared to resume their old function of holding ‘back and controlling the working class, de Gaulle could never have accomplished his “splendid undertaking’. T.K. Soviet bureaucracy