France, The United States And De Gaulle

De Gaulle’s return to power has been variously interpreted; but at least it should have been plain from the start that no new form of Fascism was involved. The man who had pledged the restoration of France’s liberties, and in the war and postwar years had fulfilled that pledge to the letter, was hardly one to give up his secure place in history in order to play the vulgar, brutal role of dictator. De Gaulle can be obdurate, but he is not cruel and, above all, he could not cease being civilized. Even the obduracy has· been softened through the years by patience and a kind of infinite wiliness; and a natural compassion has deepened. It is sometimes forgotten by Americans how far de Gaulle went in allaying the bitterness left in post­ war France by the Vichy experience: “France,” he used to say in those days, “has need of all her child1en.” It was in the same vein, though on a larger scale, that he could find the audacity after his return to speak of the “courage” of the Algerian rebels. He lives in a world which may not correspond entirely to reality; but it is a world of chivalry and honor and noble ethical feelings. Certainly the meanness of Fascism has no place in it.

Public opinion was in large part wrong in its appraisals of the early Hitler and Mussoini. It learned its lesson; but as so often, it overlearned it and went to the opposite extreme. Nowadays public opinion in this country tends to discern Fascism wherever order is established or authority affirmed. It is too early to tell whether de Gaulle’s great experiment will have meaning for the modern political world as a whole; if it saves France that may be all we should ask of it. Yet in an age where so much tends toward dissolution, where empires break up into the smallest and least viable entities, where parties and pressure groups claim what once belonged to the public interest, it is quite possible that the example of de Gaulle may set a new pattern of integration.

He has about him, of course, much that seems antiquated. He is the benevolent despot, the philosopher King. But it is characteristic of him always to defy being placed in any category. As a conservative, he spurns the support of the Right. As a Nationalist, he makes concessions beyond the daring of the most extreme anti-colonialists. And so in his old­ fashioned, monarchical way de Gaulle is entirely conscious of living in his own time. An eighteenth-century style distills his broodings upon the terrors of the atomic age; as in his earlier career he set forth with classical elegance the compulsion to reorganize the armed services around the internal combustion engine. The France he presides over is fully aware of the promise of modern technics, and he is resolved to push scientific development to the limit. His leadership can have significance for us all if it demonstrates how a highly civilized people, devoted to liberty, can find the common purpose and sense of authority which makes large achievements possible.

The American disposition to underestimate and to under· stand de Gaulle is only in part ideological, based on an inclination to identify Fascism with authority. It also goes back to the experience of the war years. That Roosevelt was so consistently impelled to belittle the Free French leader can hardly be explained otherwise than by the President’s rather naive conviction that he understood France better than almost anyone else. Had he not traveled there as a child? Did he not speak the language? He would have been glad to be its guardian, and indeed its governess, during the war years. But de Gaulle ruined those dreams, and the President could never forgive him. The case of Churchill is quite different. His famous remark, that the Cross of Lorraine was the heaviest of all the crosses he had to bear, is invariably cited as evidence of an implacable hostility. But the point of the remark is tha.t it was a joke; it was a lively and irreverent pun. Churchill saw that de Gaulle’s cause really was a cross, that it was high and indeed almost sacred; and he also saw that, being placed as he was in history, he had no choice but to bear that cross to the end. In his memoirs Churchill reveals how well he comprehended the· role of the Free French leader. “I knew he was no friend of England,” Churchill states. “But I always recognized in him the spirit and conception which, across the pages of history, the word ‘France’ would ever proclaim. I understood and admired, even while I resented, his arrogant demeanor.” Churchill adds that de Gaulle “had to be rude to the British to prove to French eyes that he was not a British puppet.”

As for de Gaulle, his own memoirs stress the compulsion he was under to be “difficult.” Surveying the absolute lack of means, of support, of precedent amid which he labored at the start, he comments that “this very destitution” showed him the line of conduct. “It was by adopting without compromise the cause of national recovery that I could acquire authority. It was by acting as the inflexible champion of the nation and the state that it would be possible for me to gather the consent, even the enthusiasm of the French and to win from foreigners respect and consideration. Those who, all through the drama, were offended by this intransigence were unwilling to see that for me … the slightest wavering would have brought collapse. In short, limited and alone though I was, and precisely because I was so, I had to climb the heights and never then to come down.”

The confusions and contretemps of the war years rose up before American eyes as the crisis of May, 1958, began to draw the figure of de Gaulle into its web. It was all too easy to describe the General as “aging”; to see him making a final grasp for power; to accuse him of having condoned the revolt in Algeria in order that it might serve his own purposes and ambitions. But much has happened since those hectic, men­ acing days, when the Fourth Republic was making a final show of its impotence. Opinion about de Gaulle has radically altered, both in this country and abroad. He himself, amid the universal acclaim which he received after the referendum of September, may have recalled words he had written earlier of that elite which again and again in his career was to grant him, “beyond its strictures, the melancholy homage of its remorse.”

Looking back from this brief vantage point in time, the extraordinary thing seems not that the Fourth Republic fell, but that it endured and functioned as long as it did. Americans have been all too ready to follow the justifications which French students of government regularly made for their peculiar institutions. We had accepted the fact that the French, being logical, liked to make their parties represent the niceties of differing points of view. We had been reconciled to changing cabinets on the ground that this represented merely an alteration in the facade, with many of the most important posts being held over long periods by the same ministers or by a small group acting in rotation. Be­ hind this facade we had learned to see the permanent civil service-skilled, neutral, devoted to the highest interests of the state and carrying forward consistently, despite outward changes, the significant, day-to-day business of government. But in all this we tended to miss the heart of the matter: namely, that it had become impossible in France to form a government which could govern. There did not exist in the Parliament a majority which could express its will in policy or support a cabinet capable of sustained action.

In the last Parliament of the Fourth Republic roughly a third of the members, either Communists or Rightists, were excluded from all responsibility. The cabinets had to be picked from the circumscribed center group, made up of combinations which shifted according to the particular circumstances and maintained their cohesion on condition of not taking any action that was decisive. The exclusion of the large block of Communist deputies put the center of political gravity to the right of general French opinion, thus alienating the Parliament from the people. Within the chamber a game went forward which seemed divorced from the realities of the national life, its sterile maneuvers conforming to rules and interests with which the people had increasingly little concern. In the end, huge majorities piled up behind Pflimlin had virtually no meaning, while de Gaulle, with the vast preponderance of the Parliament still against him, loomed up as one solid and irreversible fact.

It is hard to see how this kind of government could have satisfied the needs of even the quietest epochs. Actually, it had to play its role while the Algerian crisis was tearing at the vitals of the French people. The war across the Mediterranean was bitter and costly, searing the soul of France as well as consuming its physical substance. There seemed no way to win it, no way to withdraw from it, no way even to begin the process of negotiation and peace-making. In Morocco and Tunisia there had been organized elements with which France could deal. But Algeria revealed only a hidden, constantly menacing, and constantly disappearing enemy; an opposition formless, anonymous, and mute. Algeria, besides, represented the end of a bitter road, stretching from Indo-China through Suez and Tunisia to this last land, avowedly part of France itself, where neither magnanimity nor compromise seemed any longer possible. An understandably embittered army tended by its ruthlessness to turn a civil war into an unappeasable conflict of race and color. Senseless tortures showed the kind of degradation even the most civilized of nations will reach when there is no hope of peace and no clear purpose behind the fighting.

Meanwhile successive governments in Paris found themselves powerless. Mollet fell when he could not raise the credits for even the most modest military and economic reforms in Algeria. His successor, Bourges-Manoury, fell before the same Rightist coalition when he tried to secure an even milder reform program. Gaillard was to lose office over attempts to deal with the Tunisians who were supporting the Algerian Nationalists. While the hands of the statesmen were thus tied, they were compelled, at the cost of having the army disavow them, to give their support to the most extreme and even the most inhumane of military actions. It was when Gaillard found himself with no alternative but to support the vengeful bombing of Sakiet that the extent to which the authority of the state had been undermined was fully and fatally revealed.

By the spring of 1958, the smell of rottenness was in the French air. Incongruously enough, the nation was economically prosperous. The effects of the American recession had not been felt. Indeed the French national product had grown during the year by about 8 per cent, while our own was falling by the same amount. The miracle of the postwar reconstruction was virtually complete, and this, combined with the dramatic rise in the birth rate, had given France for the first time in half a century the sense of new possibilities of growth and development. The country had almost forgotten what it was like to need new schools, to say nothing of new housing, new sources of power, new forms of recreation for the people. Yet all this was of little profit while the political situation festered. Only by recalling our own McCarthy period can one have the sense of heavy, inarticulate terror which hung over political discussion as the last chapter of the Fourth Republic was about to be written. Gaillard retained office under the surveillance of Rightist cliques; so humiliating a price as the banning of a book critical of the army in Algeria—a book which had circulated freely and been widely read for months—was exacted of him for the dubious privilege of remaining in power while the Parliament adjourned for the Easter recess. He was not alone in his subjection. The growing power of the Rightists, combined with the sullen threat of a mutinous army, made it difficult for anyone to speak out freely.

Gaillard fell, as was inevitable, in April; and the last phase was played out under Pflimlin. Events were taken out of Pflimlin’s hands, and he was made to appear a forlorn and even slightly ridiculous figure. Yet he fought well for the Republic already doomed; he initiated, although too late, constitutional reforms which might have been crucially significant; and he contrived in the end to turn over power, without bloodshed or disorder, to the man whom a virtually united Parliament had opposed. W11at he could not have foreseen, and could not master, were the developments which took place on May 18 in Algeria itself. It is now plain that General Salan, the French general in charge of Algeria, and the famous parachutist Massu were themselves the victims of a tide beyond their control. The revolt which the nationalist extremists had begun they dared not resist; indeed they found no alternative but to join it. Pflimlin, in turn, seemed to have no alternative but to join them-or at least, while they engaged in their gestures of disobedience, to accept them as his loyal agents and spokesmen.

There the matter might conceivably have rested, while through a prodigious effort at digestion the French government in Paris tried to bring the rebels within the pale of legality. The rebels, however, had still cards of their own to play. The name of de Gaulle was raised. While the General maintained his seclusion, Soustelle escaped from police surveillance in Paris and brought to Algiers the stimulus of a political leadership combined with a nationalist fervor satisfying to the extremists. Then, in a daringly conceived move, the rebels landed in Corsica and took over the island. This was not quite like a landing in France, but it, fortified the specter of parachutists descending over Paris—a specter made the more alarming when the government found that it could not count on the armed forces to put down the Corsican insurrection. Pflimlin must have known by then that his government could fight to get better terms from de Gaulle but that it could not hope to hold out indefinitely against the man who alone seemed to give promise of restoring authority over the army and over Algeria. He could secure votes of confidence from the Assembly (the Communists were now supporting him to provide huge majorities); but these meant nothing in relation to the rapidly developing threat of dis­ order. It was said by the parliamentarians that in the circumstances he could not resign; but his own purpose must have become fixed even while his unprecedented majorities were being recorded. Meanwhile President Coty was taking exceptional measures, outside any strict construction of the constitution, to pave the way for de Gaulle; and Mollet was preparing a crucial split in the Socialist party. Once it was plain that there could not be a new popular front, there was no course open except the return of France’s wartime leader.

The role of de Gaulle in these days has been much debated. Anyone less notably honest than himself, anyone about whom insinuations of conspiracy could more plausibly have been spread, would have been vulnerable indeed. For in order to remain master of the situation de Gaulle conceived it necessary to stop short of condemning outright the uprisings in Algeria; yet he had to keep a position which would enable hint ultimately to suppress them. In vain Pflimlin and Mollet tried to get him to repudiate the rebels. “It is profoundly normal and natural that Algerians cry ‘Vive de Gaulle,’ as all French do in agony or in hope.” With this statement at his press conference de Gaulle turned aside the attempts to make a complete break between himself and the leaders of the committee of public safety in Algiers. “One does not cry ‘Vive de Gaulle’ when one is not with the nation,” he added with that strange mixture of arrogance and perception which is the mark of his leadership. Of the uprising in Corsica, de Gaulle did have to speak more harshly, but not harshly enough to infuse the breath of life into Pflimlin’s ineffectual efforts to assure public order. Meanwhile,’ in words and deeds the first citizen of Colombey was making plain his readiness to form a government of his own, alternating between expressions of a clear will to act and Roman acceptance of a final withdrawal and resignation.

There is no question but that de Gaulle could have given Pflimlin better support than he did. Perhaps he could have preserved for a short while the crumbling authority of the Fourth Republic. Those who condemn him underemphasize the real threat of bloodshed in the metropolis; they accept the questionable assumption that the faltering regime could have been propped up and made serviceable. In fact, revolution was afoot. De Gaulle rode the whirlwind, and the final justification of his course must be in the success which he has made, and may make, out of last May’s turbulent events.

On his assumption of power he was faced by two paramount tasks: to make a constitution and to make peace in Algeria. It was the measure of de Gaulle’s statesmanship that he saw the two tasks to be closely interrelated and set about solving both with energy and directness. Flying to Algiers he could open his first speech with the audacious words: “I have understood you. I know what happened here. I see what you wanted to do. I see that the road you have opened is the road to renewal and brotherhood.” His formulations were deliberately ambiguous. In his words each side could still see a reflection of its own desires. But the note of hope and reconciliation had been struck; and these were to form the basis of de Gaulle’s persistent and really noble effort to infuse into the dead weight of the struggle some healing touch of humanity. Later he was to be able to praise the courage of the rebel fighters and to offer them “the peace’ of brave men.” Outside of Algeria itself he immediately began the work of putting relations with Tunisia and Morocco on a sound footing. With a few bold strokes he cut through the problems that had brought Tunisia to the point of warfare against France, settling with Bourguiba the withdrawal of French troops from the country and providing recognition of the sovereignty of the naval base of Bizerte. In return, de Gaulle got the right to construct a pipeline across Tunisia to carry oil from the Sahara wells.

The shaping of a new constitution was part of the conditions under which de Gaulle took power. What was striking in his leadership was his ability to see the task in terms of its dynamic quality: as a way of forging unity, establishing his own authority, and offering a new rallying point for the North African peoples. In a sense the actual form of the constitution was less important than the process which brought it to birth. De Gaulle abandoned what must have been his first disposition, to stand as arbiter, above the battle, letting the French people confront the constitutional choice by themselves. Instead he invested his own prestige in the struggle. In a giant campaign across Africa the picture be­ came familiar of de Gaulle amid alien peoples, seemingly tireless, towering over those around him, his hand out­ stretched half-gropingly, half in a kind of awkward blessing. Back in metropolitan France the campaign continued, until the cause of the Constitution and the cause of de Gaulle became inextricably mixed. The conversion of the referendum into a kind of personal plebiscite was the serious risk de Gaulle ran. But the reward was a massive majority which expressed the solidarity of the French people, startled the world by the favorable proportions of the vote in Africa, and created the affirmative conditions which could alone give some assurance that the new document would prove workable.

De Gaulle did not pause long before taking advantage of the momentum thus gained. At Constantine he issued his program for social and economic reconstruction in Algeria. On October 9 he dispatched his famous instructions to General Salan, calling for a withdrawal of military elements from the Algiers committees of safety and insisting that the lists of candidates in the new elections be open to all tendencies. The Algiers nationalists swallowed hard. The man whom they had called into power had had the last word, and in the end there was no choice but to obey. In the cabinet at Paris Soustelle listened to the Premier read out the letter he had composed without prior consultation or advice: as Minister of Information it was now his task to make public to the world these instructions which denied the whole basis of the May 18 revolt. A week later de Gaulle went further and in a press conference issued his call for negotiations with the nationalist forces in Algeria. There was no more talk of preconditions, no limitations on what might be discussed. It was the act of a supremely confident man, speaking for a nation which had again found its own confidence, and expressing everything that was reasonable and heroic in the French spirit. Any political leader who a few months before had made such an appeal would have been run out of public life as a traitor. When de Gaulle spoke there was no group in France which could bring itself to oppose him.

The ultimate success of the de Gaulle experiment was still far from assured by the autumn of 1958. In the end all would depend upon gaining peace in Algeria. France needed peace from every point of view. It could not afford, economically, morally, or politically, to carry on the dreary fighting; and every other process of national reform waited upon this one issue. Despite the immense energy and imagination which de Gaulle had spent in transforming the situation, a favor­ able outcome was far from certain. He had dared to gamble to the extent of promising immediate independence to any part of the French empire which chose to vote against the Constitution. At Brazzaville he had even promised that those territories which voted “yes” would have a chance to alter their status within the new Constitutional framework. The world had begun to see France in a very different light from that which it had presented in recent years—no longer as defensive, clinging desperately to what it could not hold by natural force and attraction, but open-handed, humane and generous. Within the African populations this new ferment had begun to work. Yet the call for negotiations (though it had been painstakingly prepared by intermediaries of de Gaulle and the Nationalists) misfired. Even more disturbing, the new Moslem personalities which had been expected to come forth through the elections showed themselves still unwilling or afraid to present themselves as candidates. It seemed as if de Gaulle almost alone retained his optimism, convinced that out of the changing situation, with good faith manifesting itself on both sides, new possibilities would open up.

Apart from Algeria, the chances for a vigorous republican regime were clouded. De Gaulle’s very success silenced op­ position, and in the acclaim universally accorded him there was a faintly disturbing and even ominous note. He had come to power with a vote of only 829 to 224 (with 82 abstentions) in the Assembly. In the campaign for the constitution he had faced formidable opposition, especially among the intellectuals. Mendes-France had campaigned for’ an adverse vote. Within the party conventions held in September sharp divisions among the most eminent leaders were revealed. But as a result of the dramatic post-referendum moves, all this opposition vanished. Everyone became Gaul­ list; to be Gaullist and to be French were almost synonymous. It was a glorious but rather terrifying moment. As Servan-Schreiber complained in L’Express, the political life of France had been reduced “to the meditations of a single man.” This man might save the present; but if a generation grew up in a habit of veneration and acquiescence, who would save the future?

The instrument of political renewal was a constitution which still waited to have many of its details filled in, but which seemed capable of working well enough in the short run. Its President was made in the image of de Gaulle, a leader above parties, with power to act where the permanent interests of the state are involved, and strongly armed for an emergency. The government was no longer a mere ad hoc committee of the parliament, but separated from it by being appointed by the President and not permitted to retain a seat in the Assembly while holding ministerial office. The Parliament was rigidly limited in the duration of its sessions, and its power to vote no confidence in the government was balanced by the President’s clear right of dissolution.

Perhaps the greatest mystery in these arrangements was how the method of electing a President should prove applicable once de Gaulle himself had left the scene. An electoral college containing more than 70,000 representatives of official bodies in the metropolis and in the empire would be expected to select the eminent leader. But how would such a leader emerge? By what process of selection and campaigning would be present himself? The answer to this mystery was another enigma: whether the Fifth Republic would remain a Presidential government, or whether the growing power of the parties would restore something more nearly like the older system, with the Premier, rather than the President, becoming the real leader. If the President should dwindle in time to something like a figurehead, his election would obviously not provide insuperable difficulties.

De Gaulle’s immediate purpose has plainly been to create a durable and representative majority in the Parliament. He has not sought to rule, but to create the conditions within which rule by a stable government becomes possible. The electoral law, restoring the old arrondissement, was designed to undercut both extremes—the de Gaullists of the Right as well as the Communists. He let it be known that no party could use his name in the elections and made it clear to Soustelle that he expected his group to make its alliances with the Center rather than with the Right. In all this there is a disinterestedness which is undeniably appealing; but again, there is some cause for uneasiness in the role of deus em machina which de Gaulle finds it natural to play.

I remember watching him in Algiers in 1948, when as leader of the provisional government he took his part in the consultative assembly. He was vigorous and effective in keeping this parliamentary experiment within bounds, constantly insisting that its prerogatives were limited by the necessity of giving the French a free choice after the liberation. This same manner is less appropriate in dealing with the freely elected representatives of a sovereign people; yet de Gaulle undoubtedly conceives it as a major function of the President to keep Parliament from acting foolishly or of going to extremes which would discredit it with the nation. At his press conference in October, with a sweep of his long arms, he could indicate dramatically how parliamentary institutions would be swept away for a long time if the old abuses crept back into the Fifth Republic.

It is in foreign affairs, however, that the new President has imagined his chief service to lie. To him the idea of a France without weight and influence in world counsels is a disaster—both for the world and for France itself. “France is not really herself unless in the front rank,” he has written; his strongest conviction, he says, is that only “vast enterprises are capable of counterbalancing the ferments of dispersal which are inherent in her people; that our country, as it is, surrounded by the others, as they are, must aim high and hold itself straight, on pain of mortal danger. In short, to my mind, France cannot be France without greatness.” De Gaulle’s profound feeling for the importance of Africa is certainly not that of an old-time imperialist; political power or economic advantage are not his aim. Rather it seems to be the regeneration of France at home, the lifting up of its sights to a large destiny in the international community. As the Algerian problem cannot be solved without discipline and magnanimity at the core, so no other problem, in Europe or elsewhere, can be solved if Algeria is lost.

In terms of Europe de Gaulle’s attitude leads inevitably toward a major role for France, and also toward a Europe strengthened and integrated. But it can never be a “little Europe,” a union of only six nations, that satisfies him. Beyond those countries which are joining in the common market lie vaster possibilities, with the Eastern satellites and even Russia itself being somehow brought into the game. As for the United States, it is as impossible that a Gaullist France should cut itself off from this vast area of freedom as it is that France should permit itself to feel patronized or dictated to. The way of allies with one another is often troubled and uneven; every linking of national fates contains strong elements of tension, even of animosity, as well as of attraction. De Gaulle’s historical imagination undoubtedly conceives undertakings for which only the massed forces of the West are sufficient; Africa alone will require a pooling of economic and human resources which precludes any basic splits. Yet common tasks do not guarantee an easy accommodation, nor do they allow subservience on the part of any major participant.

The difficulty with de Gaulle’s statesmanship is that it so often seems to substitute vague concepts of “grandeur” for the realities of international power. By sheer will, by intellectual daring, in large part by rhetoric, he reconstituted a France shattered by wartime defeat; it is not surprising that he should give greater emphasis than some men to what can be accomplished by leadership alone. In his moves for a larger role for France within NATO there is, moreover, a solid recognition both of France’s geographical position and also of the need to give to his nation some persuasive conviction of NATO’s importance. We should not forget how close the French people had come to letting themselves believe that NATO could be sacrificed to the necessities of pacifying and holding Algeria. They had seen the European “shield” stripped of almost all French troops, without any noticeable fear that they were opening themselves to war or invasion. They had come to feel increasingly that the military alliance was aimed against an unreal threat, while a common strategy against the larger dangers was lacking. In proposing a NATO directorate of three major powers, including France, de Gaulle has struck at the heart of a real problem. But in doing so he has had to demand for France, only recently divided and politically prostrate, a predominance which not all its friends seem quite prepared to recognize.

Intelligence and vision nevertheless do play a part, at moments a transforming part, in international affairs; and with de Gaulle the West has in its front ranks a man who perhaps more clearly and deeply than any other leader today has brooded upon the big problems of the twentieth century. It is impossible to move about in the universe which he has created by his writings and speeches without being struck by the dimensions of his vision. His special world is invariably large, subject to profound transformations and evolutions in its depths, and for this reason capable of being brought through leadership to reveal new possibilities and combinations. It was the sense of vast forces still waiting to make themselves felt which gave to his appeal of June 18, 1940, its prophetic quality. Before that he had cried out against the prevailing concept of a war fought defensively and in a limited area, seeing modern means of destruction endowed “with such force, speed and range that the present conflict will be marked, sooner or later, by movements, surprises, breakthroughs and pursuits the scale and rapidity of which will infinitely exceed those of the most lightning events of the past.” This same sense of variety and unpredictableness marks de Gaulle’s sense of the political world. He lives in an open universe, and it is his natural disposition to push out­ ward toward solutions on the grand scale.

Atomic weapons provide a natural focus for de Gaulle’s statecraft. Here, unbelievably magnified, is a revolution in warfare and in society comparable to that which was brought about by the internal combustion engine. As a humanist, the French leader recognizes in his depths the threat to civilization; as one who has strangely combined a feeling for science with a feeling for ideas and values, he is strongly conscious of its brighter implications. As a patriot, finally, he is galled by any thought of France’s being reduced to “a position of chronic and overwhelming inferiority.” There have been times in recent years when France seemed to aspire to atomic weapons as a kind of magic potion to assuage the loss of prestige in North Africa; some of France’s critics even pro­ fessed a fear that she aspired to them in order to have a ready means of terrorizing the rebels. With de Gaulle the drive toward success in the atomic field has far deeper motivations. He has himself spoken of France’s resolve to attain this source of power in order to make “our action felt in fields that are precious and useful to all mankind: those of world security and disarmament.”

De Gaulle’s initiatives,’ in this field as in others, remain in the realm of generous hints. The fulfillment of his objectives—from political stability to world security—still lie on the further side of serious, sometimes it seems insurmountable, obstacles. Yet it is the quality of the man to create the impression that while he may choose to give out only hints and intimations, he keeps within himself a vision of the whole; that while he freely expends his energy he still retains large stores untouched. This feeling of a yet unrevealed depth and wholeness below the surface is one of the secrets of de Gaulle’s personal authority; and it is one of the factors from which France today, and indeed the West as a whole, can draw a solid measure of reassurance.