August 29, 1980

NEW SOLIDARITY Page 7

How de Gaulle Saved The French Republic:

What Every American Should Know About Nationalism by Garance Phau Part III

At the Brazzaville conference of January 1944, General de Gaulle lays out his program for the Third World to the French colonial leadership.

In Part I of this series, we saw Charles de Gaulle, drawing on an education in the nation-building policies of the French leadership that built the Ecole Polytechnique in the 18th century, mold French resistance to the Nazis around his personal conviction of the necessity to restore France to the status of a sovereign republic. We saw de Gaulle call the occupied French nation into the fight to liberate Europe, and build a Free French fighting force and warfighting strategy that put him in control of vital portions of French West Africa during the early course of the war. In Part II, we followed de Gaulle's strategic thinking in the battle for victory step by step: the rebuilding of the French empire around the republican ideal of a community of nations, the fight for the opening of the second front in

Europe, and, when that failed due to the evil machinations of Winston Churchill, his capture of North Africa away from the Vichy-British alliance. Here we look at how de Gaulle secured an Allied victory in World War II, and his campaign to rebuild a devastated France, and its empire, on the basis of the economic system that made America a once unrivaled industrial giant. The Second Front By spring 1944 there was no escaping the opening of the second front against the Nazis. Every condition was fulfilled for the opening of the second front in France, along the lines proposed two years earlier by Generals Marshall and de Gaulle, before the British-inspired decision for the North Africa operation undermined this plan. The Red Army was scoring remarkable victories on the Eastern front, and even Roosevelt felt the changing winds, as he told Eleanor that he was "tired of fighting wars for the British empire." But the British remained determined to use every devious means at their disposal to postpone the day of reckoning with the fascists. One ploy was their proposal for a continental invasion via the rugged and mountainous Balkan region or Italy, which de Gaulle correctly opposed as military suicide. De Gaulle had to use masterful methods to force the implementation of the plan for a double landing through Normandy and southern France, the only points of access into German-held territory where the maximum firepower of the Allies could be used. De Gaulle recalls this fight vividly in his memoirs: The Allies' strategy remained unprecise. In September 1943 they had agreed to land in Italy. But they did not agree on what to do next. The United States . . . felt capable of fighting the battle of Europe through the shortest route, in other words through France. To land in Normandy and from there move on to Paris; to land in Provence [southern France] and go up the Rhone V Valley; they intended to combine those two operations. . . The Italy campaign was for the Americans just a diversion which should not distract from the major business at hand. The British, and first of all Churchill, saw things otherwise. In their eyes the American plan was going to attack the enemy at its

strongest flank, like taking a bull by the horns. When one should rather hit the soft underbelly of the animal. Instead of setting the objective of reaching Germany through France, the British argued that the Allies should cross Danubian Europe, through Italy and the Balkans. The big effort of the Alliance should be to push through Italy, to land in Yugoslavia and in Greece. . . Naturally this strategy corresponded to London's policy of establishing British supremacy over the Mediterranean and the fear that the Russians would arrive and take the place of the Germans. During the Teheran and Cairo conferences, in the message which the Prime Minister [Churchill] addressed to the President [Roosevelt], and during the working sessions of the Anglo-Saxon organism called "Combined Chiefs of Staff Committee" in Washington, we [the Free French] knew that the British were trying to impose their plans. But whatever the care with which our Allies took to keep us out of their deliberations, we had sufficiently important forces that one could not ignore our own resolve. And . . . I did not rally to Churchill's conception. From the military standpoint an operation from Mediterranean into Central Europe bore too many contingencies. Should one succeed in swiftly breaking through the enemy forces occupying Italyalthough nothing showed there would be a rapid victory then one would have to cross the enormous barrier of the Alps. If one could think of landing in Dalmatia, how were the armies to cross the Yugoslav mountains? Greece no doubt was accessible, but further North the mountains of the Balkans presented rugged obstacles. Furthermore, the American and British armies were trained to operate in open territory with heavy mechanical reinforcement, and, thanks to regular convoys, to live without too much deprivation. I had trouble imagining them launched across the tormented terrain of the Balkan peninsula, without convenient ports to serve as bases, with, for communications, only mediocre and few roads, rare and slow railroads, having in front of them the experts in the art of using natures obstacles: the Germans.

No, it was in France that the decisive battle should be sought, on a terrain favorable to speedy operations, at the immediate proximity of naval and air bases and where the Resistance, acting on the enemy's rear, would serve as an asset of the first order for the Allies' game-plan. When de Gaulle saw Churchill getting one of his men, General Maitland Wilson, nominated for the command of the Mediterranean forces, he thought that "save for a reaction on our part, the persistence of Churchill will lead to the implementation of the British plan on the southern flank." There would be one landing, in Normandy but none through the south of France, severely weakening the northern operation. Half of the Armies would invade from the Balkans or Italy and would freeze to death in the Alps, or get hunted like rabbits by the Germans in the Balkans. De Gaulle acted swiftly to stop Churchill's plans. De Gaulle chose an Allied demand for a specific Free French regiment for the Italy theater as a pretext to torpedo British plans. He refused to send the regiment, and telegraphed the British and American command his request for a meeting to work out the conditions for Free French participation in the war effort. At a joint meeting, de Gaulle made clear that Free French participation was contingent upon the implementation of the official Allied plan for a combined continental invasion through both Normandy and southern France. The British were forced to pledge themselves to the Allied plan and drop all operations to deploy troops elsewhere. The agreement de Gaulle concluded with the Allies also provided that a Free French division would be stationed in England to take part in Operation Overlordthe Normandy landing. The Liberation With the Free French army participating in the Allied invasion plan, the prestige gained by the reconquest of the empire, and the support of the French Underground, de Gaulle was absolutely certain of his powers to restore Republican rule to France the moment the Allies had expelled the Nazi occupiers. De Gaulle got permission from Churchill and Roosevelt to "visit" the front. Once he had arrived, he did not stop until he was head of the French government.

Once again, the British and their agents were taken totally by surprise. Jean Monnet, the famed creator of the European Coal and Steel Community and a life-long British agent from the time of his dealings in China's dope trade with Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank, was at the time adviser to Roosevelt on French affairs. Monnet, a source of many misunderstandings between de Gaulle and the American President, had planned that France would be ruled like an occupied country, exactly like defeated Germany. The role of the

August 27, 1945, de Gaulle, speaking to hundreds of thousands from New York's City Hall, calls for an enduring Franco-American alliance to win the peace through global development.

Free French armies would be ignored. The country would be broken up, with existing Vichy potentates ruling over their local communities, rendering France defenseless against the plan for destruction of industry across the European continent the British had in mind. But de Gaulle swept Monnet's plan away in one stroke. He urged Eisenhower to march on Paris, arguing that not to do so would open the way for an insurrection that would lead to the destruction of the city in the hands of the Nazis, impeding the war effort in final analysis. Eisenhower, who had great respect for de Gaulle, okayed the operation, and on Aug. 25, 1944 the famed Free French division of General Leclerc liberated Paris. De Gaulle marched down the Champs Elysee with the heroes of the Resistance, acclaimed by millions of Parisians as the embodiment of the Republic, the true leader of a self-government by the people that the American founding fathers once established on these shores. A Hamiltonian Economic Policy France was in utter ruin. Yet from the ruins, Charles de Gaulle was to lay the basis for a formidable nation, today's third nuclear power. His achievement in the 16 months he was in power was such that his British enemies, though they would take the country from him in 1946 and rule it through dozens of puppet prime ministers until the generals comeback in the spring of 1958, were unable to wipe out his legacy. When de Gaulle seized power, there was not a single bridge left standing on the Seine river between Le Havre and Paris, on the Loire river between Nevers and St. Nazaire, or on the Rhone from Lyon down to the sea. The country was chopped up into pieces with a totally collapsed transportation system. The few trucks and rails in existence were used to continue the Allies' war effort. Less than 9,600 kilometers of canals were usable out of the 52,000 km operating in 1938; just 2,900 locomotives were running out of 170,000. De Gaulle was confident in the powers of the State to put the economy back on its feet though he knew what hardship it would entail. He called on the population to go beyond what they might imagine themselves capable of, to realize the salut public, public salvation, the restoration of the Republic.

De Gaulle was no believer in the infantile and egotistical slogan of "free enterprise" which under the circumstances France found itself in in 1944 would have meant the right to die. He embarked on a bold dirigist program in the best tradition of Hamilton. His memoirs describe this state capitalist program: To acquire for the nation the property of the principal sources of energy: coal, gas, electricity, which besides she has the capacity to develop properly; to insure her control over credit, so her activity could not be at the mercy of financial monopolies; to open for the working class the possibility of "association" [with management in plant management] through the "EnterpriseCommittee," to free our men and women from the anguish in life and work by automatically insuring them against disease, unemployment and old age; finally thanks to a system of large bonuses to raise French birth rates and hence reopen for France the live source of her power; those are the reforms which I proclaimed as my government's intentions on March 15, 1944, and so it will be. De Gaulle's government carried out this strategy with the creation of Electricite de France, Gaz de France, Charbonnages de France, all national companies to promote energy development. Famed scientist and Communist Party member Pierre Joliot-Curie visited de Gaulle to propose the creation of an Atomic Energy Commission to help further French research into atomic power. De Gaulle subsequently set up the Atomic Energy Commissariat and put Joliot-Curie in charge. While de Gaulle sought to provide the Republican framework within which individual capitalist entrepreneurs could prosper, he adopted a policy of nationalization and used it against those businessmen who refused to abide by his mandate to maximize production. De Gaulle seized the assets of those businessmen who were not concerned with producing and used their assets as leverage for political power on behalf of monetarist policiesthe die hard Vichyite faction. Hence Regie Renault, the state owned automobile company, came into being after its evil owner was dispossessed. The only "free enterprise" de Gaulle allowed, was the right to increase profits through greater and greater contribution to the nation's economy. De Gaulle's seizure of credit away from British control provided the nation with the means necessary to foster growth by supporting those businessmen,

those exports, that research, which would yield the highest rate of return for the nation's economy. In dealing with the problems of an inherited and very high rate of inflation, de Gaulle refused to adopt the "fiscal control" austerity measures advocated by his first prime minister, Social Democrat Pierre Mendes-France. The prime minister was forced to resign, and de Gaulle, instead of adopting the accountant's mentality of budgetary gimmicks, implemented the only sane anti-inflationary policy: that of increasing productivity. De Gaulle took measures which would make cost accountants (and this species proliferate in Western cabinets throughout the world today) scream in dismay: he increased depressed wages by 40%, to guarantee a minimum standard of living for workers that would increase their productivity and their purchasing power; he encouraged industrial investment with available credit; and he floated a national loan to soak up excess liquidity, channeling individual savings into the state's coffers. The loan was a brilliant success after de Gaulle went on television to appeal for funds. In the fall of 1945, barely four months after the birth of his government, de Gaulle undertook a tour of the French provinces to get into direct contact with the population, which he always held himself accountable to and to hear and investigate political, production, and other problems. Millions came out to acclaim their leader. His presence was sufficient to win over even communists, and get their agreement to disarm their existing militias, leftovers from the Resistance, and have them join the regular army and police. Foreign Policy De Gaulle's foreign policy stemmed from his Republicanism: he strove to win the advanced sector, including the burgeoning Soviet power over to his vision of a world community of sovereign nation states acting in concert to develop humanity, For de Gaulle, true peace meant meeting the challenge of buoying industry and progress into the backward hinterlands of Africa, Asia, and Latin America while the industrialized sector continued advanced scientific research and technological improvements that would lay the groundwork for a future of world prosperity. In the summer of 1944, then again in 1945, General de Gaulle came to the United States. He visited not only Washington and the White House, but also Chicago and New York to address the American population directly.

With New York Mayor LaGuardia, an early Gaullist supporter, millions turned out in 1944 to greet him on Broadway as he laid a wreath under the statue of Lafayette. To assembled New Yorkers, de Gaulle hailed the war victory, and made an appeal for a Franco-American Alliance to win the peace: Together we won the war. . . It is known . . . all that the children of America supplied in the way of blood from their veins, work of their arms and minds, as well as the ardor of their hearts, so that they could seize, at long last, side by side with their allies, the first and the last, the victory which now is common to all of us. When we were together, [we] were not afraid of the war. Well, I am going to tell you now a secret which you can tell to others: because we are together, we are not afraid of the peace. We know well all that this peace, which comes to us after so many ruins, so many things torn, massacred, and saddened brings to us in the way of problems. We know well that those problems, for a solution, will require at least as much effort, perhaps as many sacrifices, though they may not be the same sacrifices, as were required of us to conquer. But what! The goal is so fair! The things that have to be done are so necessary, so necessary for the men and the women of this world that we know well we will not shrink away. . . That goal is nothing more or less than this: to give to all the men, all the women in this world . . . those achievements to which God, first of all, and next their own efforts, have given themhave they not? the right. We wish to act in such a way, we the nations, that the people shall have both won the war and, tomorrow, have won the peace. . . I hope I have made felt to what extent the duty is great for us all, French and Americans, and to what extent what we should do is needed to be done immediately, to what extent we are sure that no obstacle . . . will stop us tomorrow in the peace, any more than any obstacle stopped us yesterday in the war.

Long live France! And long live the United States, joined fraternally for a common destiny. In 1945, de Gaulle also traveled to Russia, sealing an alliance with Stalin to prevent the resurgence of war on the continent. While the ostensible purpose of the alliance was to make sure Germany would never again rise to a position of predominance from which it could threaten Europe, de Gaulle admits in his memoirs that the need to counterbalance the Anglo-Saxon alliance was foremost in his mind: "The Franco-Russian solidarity, though often ill treated, nonetheless remained in the natural order of things, as much vis-a-vis the German danger as towards the Anglo-Saxon attempts at hegemony." The Brazzaville Perspective De Gaulle's program for securing global peace through north-south collaboration for development was laid out most forcefully at the January 1944 conference of the nations of the French empire convened in Brazzaville under the leadership of Gaullist Chad governor Felix Eboue. There, the general proclaimed that the second half of the 20th century would be marked by the process of decolonization, and the rise of nationalist impulses in the developing sector. De Gaulle perceived that this process of development would naturally lead to national independence for the colonies, in fact, within a few years for all but the most economically backward. The task of the colonial motherland was to assist in the education of developing sector elites who could lead the colonies into independence as viable national entities, developing their economies in close collaboration with the motherland, which would provide the technology and credit necessary for the realization of these aims. De Gaulle's program for the French colonies specifically proposed the formation of a "community" in which France would pledge to work toward achieving the highest rate of industrial and labor power development in the colonies. In return, the community would be made stronger by the colonies' agreement to act in common, under France's leadership, in the conduct of foreign financial, and defense policy. This formulation, based on agreement between the developed and the developing nations for an effort to achieve the highest rates of technological development in the world as a whole, flew in the face of Britain's radical liberationist ideology, and its right-wing complement, the antidevelopment cultural relativist view.

De Gaulle never deviated from the policy laid out at Brazzaville. In November 1959, after returning to power after 13 years of absence, he promoted his community principle along these lines: Where would North America, South America, Africa, Oceania, a large part of Asia, be today if the explorers, settlers, soldiers, missionaries, engineers, and doctors of the West hadn't gone there bringing ideas, action, organization and Western technology? Yes, these countries were conquered, revealed, awakened. Now this has been done, and from one end of the earth to the other each people is becoming conscious of itself and wants to determine its own fate. . . This fact too is world wide: these people put in contact with progress are assailed with a growing desire to see their own standards of living rise. In a world where some live in prosperity, people find it more and more difficult to resign themselves to unsatisfied hunger, to exposure to the weather, to death in epidemics, to vegetating in ignorance, and these people want to have, like in turn, well cultivated lands, mines, factories, roads, railroads and bridges, airplanes, ships, schools, universities. And how can they acquire that without the financial, administrative and technical assistance of those who have the means for it? As a people becomes independent, it needs the help of others. This is the perspective with which de Gaulle not only won the war, but secured the peace. (to be continued)