Abstract
The dozen years dating from de Gaulle’s “irrevocable” resignation on January 20, 1946, until his return to power on June 1, 1958, when the National Assembly appointed him as the Fourth Republic’s last premier, the last to head the regime he had always condemned, are poorly known.1 Of this twelve and a half year “interment,” six are related to the life and death of the Rally of the French People (Rassemblement du peuple française or RPF). Yet de Gaulle scarcely speaks of the rally in his memoirs, giving it a dozen (purely factual) lines in the last volume of his Mémoires de guerre and about 30 (somewhat warmer) lines in the first volume of his Mémoires d’espoir. Contemporary references to it are found in a single collection of texts, La France sera la France (France Will Be France), compiled by a then obscure colleague, Georges Pompidou, for the 1951 election. Not until 1970, when a multivolume edition of de Gaulle’s “discours et messages” was published, did all his speeches of the period appear in print.2 Even his most comprehensive biographer, Jean Lacouture, passes over the period quickly. In his 1,255-page biography of de Gaulle, he assigns just 36 pages to the years between 1946 and 1958, from the time the general resigned as head of France’s postwar government until his political restoration in the wake of the Algerian crisis and the mutiny within the French army. De Gaulle’s followers describe these years as the “crossing of the desert.” The phrase, however, suggests a certain inevitability that the crossing was destined to succeed. More appropriate is use of a less fateful reference, L’attente (Waiting), the title, in fact, of the second volume of de Gaulle’s Discours et Messages (Speeches and Messages).3
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Notes
Pierre Nora, ed., Les lieux de mémoire (Paris: Gallimard, 1997), 2:2523, note 26.
Charles de Gaulle, Discours et messages, vol. 2, Dans l’attente (février 1946–avril 1958) (Paris: Plon, 1970.
Jean-Pierre Rioux, “De Gaulle in Waiting, 1946–1958,” in Hugh Gough and John Horne, eds., De Gaulle and Twentieth Century France (London and New York: Edward Arnold, 1994), 36, 37.
Alden Hatch, The De Gaulle Nobody Knows. An Intimate Biography of Charles de Gaulle (New York: Hawthorne Books, 1960), 203.
Michel Debré, Trois Républiques pour une France, Mémoires (Paris: Albin Michel, 1984–1988), vol. 2, Agir, 1946–1958, 40–42.
Pierre Viansson-Ponté, The King and His Court (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1964), 32.
Charles Williams, The Last Great Frenchman: A Life of General Charles de Gaulle (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1993). Williams, The Last Great Frenchman, 322.
Jean Lacouture, De Gaulle. The Ruler, 1945–1970 (New York: Norton, 1993), 134.
Jean Touchard, Le gaullisme, 1940–1969 (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1978). 97.
Don Cook, Charles De Gaulle. A Biography (New York: Putnam Publ., 1983), 304.
Gerhard Weinberg, Visions of Victory. The Hopes of Eight World War II Leaders (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2005), 165–166.
Charles de Gaulle, Mémoires de Guerre. vol. 1, L’Appel, 1940–1942: Documents (Paris: Plon, 1954), 389–390;
Douglas Johnson, “De Gaulle and France’s Role in the World,” in Hugh Gough and John Horne, eds., De Gaulle and Twentieth Century France (London: Arnold, 1944), 83–94;
Alexander Werth, De Gaulle. A Political Biography (Baltimore: Penguin, 1967), 215, 216.
Fondation Charles de Gaulle, Avec de Gaulle: Témoignages, 2 vols. (Paris: Nouveau Monde Édition, 2005), vol.2. Le Temps du rassemblement, 1:11. Werth, De Gaulle. A Political Biography, 214, 216, 220.
Louis Terrenoire, De Gaulle, 1947–1954, Du RPF à la traversée du désert (Paris: Plon, 1981), 11.
Anthony Hartley, Gaullism: The Rise and Fall of a Political Movement (London: Routledge, 1972), 93;
Leslie Derfler, President and Parliament. A Short History of the French Presidency (Boca Raton, FL: University Presses of Florida, 1983), 31–33, 55–58, 93–96.
Terrenoire, De Gaulle, 1947–1954, 12.
Pierre Galante, The General (London: Frewin, 1969),169; Werth, De Gaulle. A Political Biography, 212–214.
Christian Purtschett, Le Rassemblement du Peuple Français, 1947–1953 (Paris: Cujas, 1965), vi;
François Mauriac, De Gaulle (New York: Doubleday, 1966), 286.
Philip Williams, Crisis and Compromise. Politics in the Fourth French Republic (Hamden, Conn: Anchor Books, 1964), 327–328.
Cited in Roy Pierce, “De Gaulle and the RPF. A Post-Mortem,” The Journal of Politics, 16 (February 1954), 111.
L’année politique, 1954, cited in Werth, De Gaulle. A Political Biography, 225.
Charles de Gaulle, Memoirs of Hope: Renewal and Endeavor (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1971), 16.
Terrenoire, De Gaulle, 1947–1954, 291.
Claude Mauriac, The Other de Gaulle (New York: John Day, 1973), 335.
Roy Macridis and Bernice Brown, The De Gaulle Republic. Quest for Unity (Homestead, IL: Dorsey Press, 1960), 63; Lacouture, De Gaulle, 179.
Jean-Paul Bled, “Le Général de Gaulle et l’Alemagne durant la traversée du désert,” Etudes Gaulliennes 3 (July–December 1975), 117, 118. De Gaulle was familiar with German culture and read the language fluently. Touchard, Le gaullisme, 114.
For examples of the former, see Alexander Werth and also H. Stuart Hughes, “Gaullism: Retrospect and Prospect,” in E. A. Earle, ed., Modern France, Problems of the Third and Fourth Republics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1951), 145–146. For the latter, see René Rémond, Les Droites en France (Paris: Aubier-Montaigne, 1982).
Terrenoire, De Gaulle, 1947–1954, 16; Rioux, “De Gaulle in Waiting,” 48–49.
Léon Nöel, La traversée du désert (Paris: Plon, 1973), 115.
Sébastian Danchin, Le 13 mai sans complots (Paris: Pensée Moderne, 1959), 13, 14, 16, 22, 85;
Danchin and François Jenny, De Gaulle à Colombey. Refuge d’un romantique (Nancy: Presses Universitaires de Nancy, 1990), 14, 85.
the second from Gordon Wright, Insiders and Outliers. The Individual in History (San Francisco: W.H. Freeman, 1981), 120.
Cited in Jean Charlot, Le gaullisme d’opposition (Paris: Fayard, 1983), 164.
David Reynolds, In Command of History. Churchill Fighting and Writing the Second World War (New York: Random House, 2005), 513.
Charles de Gaulle, The Complete War Memoirs of Charles de Gaulle (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1972), 998. Cook, De Gaulle. A Biography, 312.
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© 2012 Leslie Derfler
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Derfler, L. (2012). De Gaulle. In: Political Resurrection in the Twentieth Century. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137027863_3
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