Conclusion

Abstract

In May 1946 Georges Bidault recalled what General de Gaulle had told him six years earlier: France would emerge victorious ‘because we have the Sahara’.¹ The French determination to maintain its North African patrimony after 1945 was shaped by a wartime conviction that the empire would be fundamental to the reassertion of national power. Why then was it de Gaulle himself who finally completed the French retreat from North Africa? And what was the British response to the violence and disorder of France’s most traumatic imperial retreat? This book has tried to provide some possible answers. Throughout the 1950s, management of the crises in French North Africa — Algeria foremost — was a benchmark of French strategic, colonial and diplomatic capability. During this decade the earlier imperialist consensus also gradually disintegrated, causing bitter political division. To imperial traditionalists Algeria remained central to France’s status as more than a continental power. But France’s increasing colonial isolation, revealed most clearly at the UN, and the adverse impact of the war on the country’s ability to achieve key economic and military objectives within Europe persuaded most that Algérie française had become a burden. By 1960 France’s leadership of the European Community and its limited nuclear capacity exemplified the triumph of this outlook which, rightly or wrongly, is near inseparable from the figure of de Gaulle.²