May 30, 1980

NEW SOLIDARITY

Page 7

The Hidden History of the Giscard-Brezhnev Summit

General de Gaulle and the Rebirth of the French Nation

by Garance Phau
When President Giscard d'Estaing of France and President Brezhnev of the Soviet Union held their dramatic summit meeting in Warsaw May 19, a political shock reverberated throughout the capitals of the Atlantic Alliance. From Margaret Thatcher's London and Jimmy Carter's Washington, a chorus of abuse and recrimination was directed at the French President; and in the same breath in which it was shrilly asserted that Giscard had "gotten nothing" from Brezhnev, that the French action was "egotistical," "arrogant," "imperiled the unity of the West," "gave the Soviets a propaganda victory," and so forth, it was nonetheless insisted upon that the Warsaw summit was an event without intrinsic political significancea statement belied by the very hysteria which accompanied it. What was it about the Giscard-Brezhnev meeting that so disturbed the Anglo-American "Olympians"? Just this, that they had seen a European leader contemptuously cast aside the post-World War II "rules of practical geopolitics," as laid down by the Olympians themselves, and instead act to assert his nation's moral purposeto rescue the world from the horror of global war and resume the march of human progressas the primary element of his policy. Admittedly, Giscard's trip to Warsaw and the accompanying manifestations of European independence from the Olympians evidenced in the news this past week do not in themselves constitute a successful war-avoidance policy; nevertheless, without such political shocks as that delivered by President Giscard in Warsaw, no war-avoidance policy would be possible. For what Giscard's trip signified was the capability of the sovereign republican nationstate to reassert itself as the instrument for mobilizing humanity to fight its way out of the present crisis. That opportunity still exists for us, in large measure because of the work of Charles de Gaullefirst in recreating the French nation out of the ashes of its leadership's capitulation to fascism during World War II; then, when France had again compromised herself to the brink of national extinction in

In 1940, Charles de Gaulle issued a call from his London office to all Frenchmen to defend France against Vichy and the Nazis. "To all Frenchmen: France has lost the battle, but not the war."

1958, by again taking the reins of power, and reshaping his country's economic and foreign policies and rallying its citizens behind a conception

of France as a world leader in the struggle for peace and global economic development. It is Lyndon LaRouche's similar activity in the United States and Europe during the past five years which has caused European statesmen to compare him to de Gaulle, and thereby begin to grasp the demands and responsibility the present world situation places on their shoulders. It is equally true that it is the Gaullist tradition in France which has supplied President Giscard, himself a former official in de Gaulle's cabinet, with politically educated leaders in government and industry prepared to support his present policy How de Gaulle Fought If there is one theme which shines through Charles de Gaulle's own account of his actions, it is that politics is first and foremost a certain ruthless commitment to the power of ideas. In judging himself against the men who lost France to Adolf Hitler, de Gaulle makes that difference plain. For example, in his war memoirs, de Gaulle describes the attitude of Paul Reynaud, the French premier who held office when the Nazi tanks overran France. Respecting Reynaud, who had served as de Gaulle's spokesman for his unpopular military ideas in parliament during the 1930s, de Gaulle nevertheless calls attention to Reynaud's behavior in June 1940 as exemplary of the political failure of prewar France: At bottom, the personality of M. Paul Reynaud was the right one for conditions where it would have been possible to conduct the war within a state in running order and on the basis of traditionally established data. But everything was swept away! The head of the government saw the system collapsing all around him, the people in flight, the Allies withdrawing, and the most illustrious leaders failing. . . . In such conditions M. Paul Reynaud's intelligence, his courage, and the authority of his office, were so to speak, running free. He had no longer any purchase upon the fury of events. To seize the reins once more he would have had to wrench himself out of the whirlwind, cross over to Africa, and start everything afresh from there. M. Paul Reynaud saw this. But it involved extreme measures: changing the High Command, getting rid of the Marshal and half the Ministers, breaking with certain influences, resigning himself to the total occupation of

Metropolitan Francein short striking out at all costs from the ordinary framework and procedure in a situation without precedent. M. Paul Reynaud did not think fit to take upon himself decisions so far outside the normal and calculated orbit. He tried to attain the aim by maneuvering. . . . But the tragedy was too harsh to be resolved. Either make war without sparing anything, or surrender at once: there was no alternative, only these two extremes. M. Paul Reynaud, through failing to identify himself wholly with the first, gave place to Petain, who completely adopted the second. For his own strategy, de Gaulle adopted exactly the opposite stance: Go on with the war? Yes, certainly! But to what end and within what limits? Many, even among those who approved of the undertaking, wanted it to be no more than aid given by a handful of Frenchmen to the British Empire, still standing and in the fight. Not for a moment did I look at the enterprise in that way. For me, what had to be served and saved was the nation and the state. . . . For the effort to be worthwhile, it was essential to bring back into the war not merely some Frenchmen, but France. As for me, with a hill like that to climb, I was starting from scratch. Not the shadow of a force or of an organization at my side. In France, no following and no reputation. Abroad, neither credit nor standing. But this very destitution showed me my 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 of 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, intent as I was on beating innumerable conflicting pressures, 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 to the heights and never then to come down.

What de Gaulle was putting forward as his chief weapon was the moral authority of an idea. Beginnings Philosophically and morally de Gaulle had been prepared for the tasks ahead by a father and mother devoted to France, from an old family which prided itself on having served the nation as military officers and civil servants. Historian Henri de Gaulle led discussions of France's past at the dinner table. At an early age Charles developed a passion for military science, which he studied in the best tradition of the Ecole Polytechnique, created by Lazare Carnot during the Napoleonic era to educate an elite of scientific military strategists. As a colonel in the French Army in World War I, de Gaulle was captured and interned as a prisoner of war; there, in the company of the brilliant Russian military strategist Tukachevsky, he completed, his education by reading widely in the humanist tradition from Clausewitz to Plato. Between the wars, and especially after Hitler had come to power in 1933, de Gaulle waged an unceasing battle to modernize the French armed forces, vigorously polemicizing against precisely the "Maginot Line" defensive strategy of masses of troops behind "impregnable" fortifications which would be responsible for France's defeat in 1940. In a series of books and essays, notably The Army of the Future, de Gaulle argued that the development of advanced military technology and an army prepared to use it for maximum speed and shock in offensive warfare was the only sound defense policy for France: Since the machine has dominated the military order, as it has everything else, the quality of those who must work the machines used in war has become an essential element in the effectiveness of the equipment. How true this was above all for the new weaponstanks, aircraft, shipswhich had been engendered by mechanical power, were being perfected very rapidly and were reviving mobility! I noted: "It is henceforward a fact that on a land, on sea, and in the air a carefully chosen personnel, possess a terrible superiority over more or less confused masses. . ." How? The internal combustion engine supplied the basis of the answer . . . "which if it is armoured possess such a fire power

and shock power that the rhythm of the battle corresponds to that of its movements . . . Six divisions of the line and one light division, motorized throughout, armoured in part, will constitute the sort of army to bring about decisions. . ." After this came a description of how this strategic battering ram was to be used to break down a well-established resistance. . . Attack launched by three thousand tanks, disposed in several echelons on an average front of fifty kilometers, followed and supported closely by decentralized artillery, and rejoined at successive objectives by the infantry, who would be transported together with their means of fire power and of ground organization . . . and kept informed and sustained by the air force belonging to the divisions and to the army. Rate of advance of the whole system attaining normally about fifty kilometers a day." Despite repeated efforts, de Gaulle's idea of modern warfare was continuously rejected by the French government; he remarks bitterly that the German general staff made better use of his writings in preparing for war than that of his own nation. World War II Strategy Transported to London in June 1940 and utterly alone, de Gaulle was given by the British government of Prime Minister Winston Churchill air time to broadcast a message of resistance to Nazi-occupied Franceand very little else. In characteristic fashion, he set about explaining to his countrymen the only strategy which could bring France back from defeat to victory. The General emphasized that a global strategy based on realizing the warfighting potential provided by the industrial development of the United States, together with a refusal to recognize the capitulation of the French nation-state no matter what the actions of its leaders, was the keystone of the war effort: But has the last word been said? We abandon all hope? Is our defeat final and irremediable? To those questions I answer No! Speaking in full knowledge of the facts, I ask you to believe me when I say that the cause of France is not lost. The very factors that brought about our defeat may one day lead us to victory.

For remember, France does not stand alone. She is not isolated. Behind her is a vast Empire, and she can make common cause with the British Empire. . . Like England she can draw unreservedly on the immense industrial resources of the United States. . . This is a world war. Mistakes have been made, there have been delays and untold suffering, but the fact remains that there still exists in the world today everything we need to crush our enemies some day. Today we are crushed by the sheer weight of mechanized force hurled against us, but we can still look to a future in which even greater mechanized force will bring us victory. The destiny of the world is at stake. I, General de Gaulle, now in London, call on all French officers and men who are at present on British soil or may be in the future, with or without their arms; I call on all engineers and skilled workmen from the armaments factories who are at present on British soil or who may be in the future, to get in touch with me. Whatever happens, the flame of French resistance must not and shall not die. Like U.S. Chief of Staff General George Marshall and the American military generally, once the United States was in the war de Gaulle favored an immediate cross-channel invasion of the European continent by the Allies, to crush the Nazis with decisive force at the earliest possible moment. The story of how Churchill and the British twisted and turned for more than two years to delay the opening of a second front as the U.S.S.R. fought alone against Hitler on the European continent is well known; suffice it to say that the French-American strategy was eminently correct, would have restored continental Europe to its human potential at a far earlier point, and for precisely this reason, was opposed by the Anglo-American "Olympians" who sought at all costs to reassert their dominion over the continent once Hitler and the U.S.S.R. should have exhausted each other. De Gaulle's war-winning strategy was also a peace-winning strategy, premised on the idea of establishing a new, thoroughly republican entente among nation-states, in contrast to the British conception of Empire. "Yes, the organization of international solidarity on real and practical bases, but

also inspired by the eternal human idea is for the Free French a very clear and specific goal," said de Gaulle. "So many deaths, so many sacrifices, so much ruins would not be tolerable if a large and great human progress were not to emerge." African Development From a tactical standpoint, de Gaulle quickly determined almost from the moment of his arrival in Britain that he would have to establish a base of operations in French Africa, in order to recover some measure of sovereignty to the nation, as well as to mobilize the human and material resources of the French colonies for the war effort. If his Free French movement limited itself to London, its headquarters, de Gaulle understood, it could never become more than a tool of British war aims.

De Gaulle addresses French citizens in Brazzaville in 1944, the year the Free French Provisional Government was established.

Consequently, even as he began his initial efforts to awaken and organize a popular resistance to the Nazis in metropolitan France, de Gaulle moved to establish his authority first in Equatorial Africa, and ultimately in North

Africa and the Middle East. In both theaters he waged a constant war of nerves with the British, and later the Americans, who repeatedly attempted to deny him resources and opportunities to consolidate politically an independent French government prepared to assume power when the war should be won. The General insisted even at this early point that Free France was fighting, not "to retain possession of her colonies" and economic intereststhe usual canard flung at the Gaullist movement by British-influenced American media, even todaybut on behalf of a universal principle of human development. De Gaulle saw that the war, no matter how destructive, opened for Africa prospects foe progress by revolutionizing the culture of the Africans. Diametrically opposed to the British way of ruling their Empire by fomenting tribal dissension to keep those countries in a state of mental and material retardation, as slave plantations to supply raw materials for the Motherland, de Gaulle conceived of himself as the spokesman for the African's right to the technological and cultural levels prevailing in the advanced sector. On October 23, 1941 de Gaulle delivered to the Royal African Society of London a speech portraying the effects of the war in unifying and transforming the African continent. War's devouring activity imposes realizations which peaceful periods reject or postpone. Africa is in the war and we cannot doubt that this gigantic challenge will deeply influence its evolution. Isn't it becoming apparent, first of all, that this continent so compact but at the same time so divided by nature's obstacles, is in the process of acquiring because of the conduct of the war. the permeability and hence the cohesiveness which are the necessary consequences of its unity? Because the war demands that man circulate, transport, communicate, and to do so one has to find or create the means. When one travels along the African battle lines either on land, from the basin of Chad to the Suez Canal, or still yesterday from the High Nile to the Red Sea, or on the waterways alongside the Atlantic coast or on the edge of the Mediterranean Sea, one sees that multiple war activities really do intertwine

and feed into one another in spite of the distances and the difficulties. Nothing leads to a more rapid development of African communications than the ceaseless movements of troops and equipment from Brazzaville to Cairo, from Leopoldville to Gondar, from Cape Town to Alexandria. Nothing developed the big African air lines as much as the necessity to bring very quickly from Takoradi or Durban, towards the battle fields of Egypt or the Orient, innumerable transport or combat planes. Nothing has contributed more to the development of ports such as Freetown, Lagos, Douala, Pointe Noire, Matadi, Port Soudan, than military supply. While the war thus made effective the theoretical unity of Africa, by discovering and multiplying there the possibilities of travel, it has also brought to light the elements for economic unity. The African lands more or less separated at present from the metropolis, realize that they are, to a large extent, complementary one to the other. It is thus that we see for example a thousand new trade links being firmed up between Free French Africa, Nigeria, Belgian Congo, South Africa, Angola. One comes to realize from the Cape to Niger that a head of cattle born on the edge of the Chari can be eaten like any other cattle, that a truck of Johannesburg is perfectly utilizable, that a piece of cloth from Elisabethville dresses a man very well, that a vegetable from Luanda is worth preparing. But it is also, and it is perhaps above all, in the moral realm that the world crisis organizes African solidarity. It is not in vain that men coming from all corners of Africa find themselves side by side on the battle fields and serve the same cause, which they all know very well is that cause of liberty. . . Yes, this war which, in so many respects, constitutes a revolution can bring about a deep and salutary transformation of Africa in spite of the blood and tears it will shed. Already, in such statements, the outlines of de Gaulle's subsequent 19591969 efforts as President of France to throw off the yoke of NATO, and secure for Europe an independent role in developing the Third World under conditions of detente with the Soviet Union can be seen. De Gaulle himself summarized the essence of that Gaullist policy on behalf of which President Giscard has just traveled to Warsaw:

Our era, because it is that of machinery, opens an immense carrier to technological audacity and power. Henceforth, initiatives penetrate mountains, pierce isthmuses, bar rivers, capture the thermic, hydraulic and atomic sources of energy, explore space, install men under the seas. . . Who knows if one day entente and cooperation, established not only in the western part of Europe but on all the continent and naturally marked by technical realizations at the level of such an achievement, will not make of Europe the key element in the development of nations, in the peaceful balance of the world and the progress of all men? In France's footstepsif we do not agree that our species is to be condemned to catastrophessuch is today the raison d'etre and tomorrow the ambition of the European Europe!