Modern Times: The World From the Twenties to the Nineties (116 page)

The first proposed constitution for the new Fourth Republic, drawn up by the Communists and Socialists, was rejected in a referendum. A modified version, which got the grudging support of the Catholic Centre Party (
MRP
), was finally approved by the French, but only 9 million voted for it – fewer than for the earlier version. Over 8 million voted against, and 8.5 million abstained in disgust.
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Drawn up in a hurry, against the clock, amid acrimonious haggling, it was one of the worst constitutions ever foisted on a great and intelligent nation. Even its grammar was atrocious. Many provisions
were mutually contradictory; others were so complicated as to be incomprehensible. Some details were simply left out. Whole chapters (on the French Union and ‘local collectives’) were never implemented. A number of the procedures, for instance for forming a government, votes of no confidence and parliamentary dissolutions, proved unworkable. It had so many muddled compromises that even those who recommended it did not like it.
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It retained most of the chaotic vices of the Third Republic and added new ones.

Constitution-making is a thankless task. Constitutional analysis is a tedious aspect of history. But constitutions matter. Weimar failed because its constitution was clumsy. The Federal Republic succeeded because Adenauer gave it a skilfully balanced foundation. The constitution turned the Fourth Republic into a mere arena for what de Gaulle contemptuously called ‘the ballet of the parties’. Thanks to its proportional representation system, no party could form a homogeneous government. The President was a cipher, the Prime Minister, as a rule, largely impotent and often a nonentity. The shifting coalition system ruled out continuity and stability of government and, more important, made it exceedingly difficult to push through big decisions, especially unpopular measures resisted by powerful inter-party lobbies, above all colonial ones. It was no accident that the regime drifted into an unwinnable war in Indochina, ending in the surrender at Dien Bien Phu (1954), or that it finally came to grief over
Algérie française
four years later.

Yet the twelve years of the Fourth Republic were not entirely wasted. The technocratic revolution, begun under Vichy, continued. Indeed it accelerated, thanks largely to the efforts of one industrious enthusiast, Jean Monnet. His family had run a small Cognac business of the most old-fashioned, thoroughly French kind, but exporting to the world and thus possessing international horizons. He was in business abroad from the age of sixteen, usually in merchant banking and state loans, but he spent much of the Great War in the office of Etienne Clementel, the Minister of Commerce, the first Frenchman to believe that government should help capitalist enterprise to plan, and that the ‘democratic peoples’ (by which he meant West Europe and America) should form an ‘economic union’.
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In the Second World War Monnet performed outstanding services in co-ordinating Allied arms production, and was a natural choice for de Gaulle to put in charge of rebuilding France’s shattered economy. Monnet set up the
Commissariat général du Plan
, and from this base went on to construct the first organs of the future European Economic Community. He was that great rarity: a man of ideas and passionate conviction who did not believe in ideology. He thought that the only kind of industrial planning which worked was by persuasion and
consent. To him, planning machinery was a mere framework. Regulations should be designed to produce perfect competition, not Utopias. The function of planning staff was not to issue orders but to bring minds together. Planning was essentially economic diplomacy. The virtue of Monnet’s approach was that it made possible a reconciliation between planning and the market system. It reduced to a minimum the planning bureaucracy and the tyranny it breeds: at his Commissariat he had only thirty senior officials in all.
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Monnet was small, mousy, quiet, colourless, rhetoric-hating: in appearance and manner the exact opposite of de Gaulle. What the two men shared was huge persistence and will; and, equally important, the ability to inspire and lead the young. De Gaulle bred Gaullists; Monnet, the Eurocrats.

Monnet’s system of ‘indicative planning’ was the one major achievement of the Fourth Republic. But to produce its full results it required a framework of political stability capable of producing a strong currency and certain harsh and basic decisions affecting whole categories of people. That the Fourth Republic could not provide. Equally, Monnet set in motion the European Economic Community, though he did not invent it. As a customs-union (its essential characteristic), it had a long history. The Prussian common external tariff of 1818, expanded into the
Zollverein
(customs union) of 1834, had been the basis of German unity finally achieved in 1871. Experience seemed to show that common tariffs were the surest road to political unity. Luxembourg, originally a member of the
Zollverein
, had signed a convention with Belgium in 1921, involving common customs and balance of payments. After the Second World War it was extended to the Netherlands, with a common external tariff adopted by the three states on 1 January 1948 and a ‘harmonization process’ of internal tariffs beginning 15 October 1949. It was Monnet’s idea to expand the Benelux concept to include the three major powers of West Europe (he wanted Britain too), beginning with coal and steel. His German friends sold it to Adenauer, who did not claim to understand the economic details but recognized the political importance of the principle. The Treaty of Paris, signed in April 1951 by Benelux, France, Germany and Italy, brought into existence a common market in coal and steel products. Six years later, on 25 March 1957, the Six agreed to the Treaty of Rome, creating a general common market, with proposals for external and internal tariffs, the end of all restrictions on movements of persons, service and capital, ‘harmonization’ procedures to produce perfect competition and, most difficult of all, a common agricultural price-support system.

The Fourth Republic was capable of bringing France into the
EEC
but lacked the resolution to make the system work. For the working of the system depended essentially on mutual sacrifices, above all from France
and Germany. To survive within a common market, France had not merely to industrialize fast; it had to cut its traditional, inefficient peasant-type agricultural sector by three-quarters. In the early 1950s, France still had only one industrial worker per agricultural worker (in Britain it was nine to one). Out of a total working population of 20.5 million, 9.1 million lived in tiny rural communes and of these 6.5 million actually worked in agriculture; a further 1.25 million lived in semi-rural communes.
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Most of these people had to be persuaded to move into the factories, involving a social upheaval quite beyond the capacity of the Fourth Republic to carry through. To make the voluntary revolution in agriculture possible, palatable and in the end profitable, enormous sums of money had to be made available for agricultural investment. The French calculation was that this should be provided by West Germany, in the form of transfer payments or internal market taxes, under a system known as the Common Agricultural Policy. In return, Germany’s highly efficient manufacturing industry would get access to French consumer markets. The Treaty of Rome was thus a bargain of mutual sacrifice but a finely balanced one. The French agricultural revolution had to be carried through fast enough to justify the
CAP
. Equally, French industry had to modernize and expand with sufficient conviction to prevent Germany getting the best of the deal and turning France into an economic colony. Both processes required strong, self-confident government of the kind the Fourth Republic could not provide.

Even more was required: a reassertion of French nationhood. In the France of the 1950s, the ‘Europeans’ were essentially an élitist minority. The tone of French politics was often xenophobic, indeed racist, with the Communists leading the pack. They talked of ‘Schuman le boche’. A
CP
trade union leader shouted at Léon Blum: ‘Blum – in Yiddish that means a flower!’ A
CP
provincial newspaper wrote: ‘Blum, Schuman, Moch, Mayer do not smell of good French soil.’
L’Humanité
published a cartoon of ‘men of the American party’ – Schuman, Moch and Mayer – with crooked noses, remarking in embarrassment while Communists sang the ‘Marseillaise’: ‘Do we know that tune?’ ‘No, it must be one of those French songs.’
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Even in the centre and the Right, the coal-steel plan was attacked as ‘A Europe under German hegemony’, and on the Left as the ‘Europe of the Vatican’. A centre Radical like old Daladier insisted: ‘When they say Europe they mean Germany, and when they say Germany they mean Greater Germany.’ On the right, Pierre-Etienne Flandin, the old Municher, argued that ‘European federation’ meant ‘the suicide of France’. The splendidly named Léon Gingembre of the Association of Small and Medium Businesses
(Petites et moyennes enterprises) –
perhaps the most characteristic institution of the old
France – epitomized the proposed
EEC
as ‘the Europe of trusts, international business and high finance’. It was, argued one historian, a reactionary attempt to resurrect ‘the idea of the Holy Roman Empire’. ‘The past is not dead,’ he argued, ‘but survives in the German cultural world of Adenauer, Schuman and de Gasperi.’
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This combination of enemies would have made the
EEC
unworkable, especially since it had powerful xenophobic opponents within West Germany also: Schumacher called the Treaty of Paris ‘petty European, I mean a Pan-French conception … he who signs this treaty ceases to be a German’, since it was the work of Adenauer, ‘the Chancellor of the Allies’.
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Had the Fourth Republic survived, the resolution needed to prove that a Franco—German bargain could be just to both parties would have been missing.

Hence the return of de Gaulle to power in May 1958 was a watershed not only in French but in post-war European history. At first glance he did not seem the man to push forward European economic unity, any more than he was the man to dissolve
l’Algérie française.
But then de Gaulle was never exactly what he seemed. He was one of the master-intelligences of modern times, infinite in subtlety, rich in paradox, fathomless in his sardonic ironies. He was a pre-war figure with a post-war mind, indeed a futurist mind. He was a monarchist who believed Dreyfus was innocent. He was born to love the French Empire and provincial France,
la France des villages –
in fact he ended both.

The most important point to be grasped was that the essential de Gaulle was not a soldier or even a statesman but an intellectual. He was an intellectual of a special kind, whose entire life was a meditation on the theme of mind, power and action. He had, moreover, the historian’s capacity to see current events
sub specie aeternitatis.
He had been taught by his father: ‘Remember what Napoleon said: “If Pierre Corneille were alive today, I would make him a prince.” ‘
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He was always anxious to woo intellectuals, not merely because in France so many were officially classified as such: over 1,100,000 in the 1954 census,
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In 1943 in Algiers, he won over a deputation of intellectuals, led by Gide, by telling him: ‘Art has its honour, in the same way France has hers’: they realized he was an intellectual like themselves.
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On his return to power in 1958 he gave pre-eminent place to André Malraux, who sat at his right hand in cabinet and who carried more weight with de Gaulle’s inner feelings than any of his prime ministers. As for Malraux, as Gaston Palewski said, he ‘entered into the epic of de Gaulle, as we all did, like a man entering a religious order’.
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It was characteristic of de Gaulle’s intellectualism that his approach to military matters, when he was a theorist, was through philosophical and political ideas. ‘The true school of command’, he wrote in
L’Armée de métier
, lies ‘in the general culture’, adding: ‘Behind the victories of Alexander, one always finds Aristotle.’ The same approach determined his statesmanship. His favourite quotation (with which he opened his
War Memoirs)
was the famous ‘hymn to power’ from Goethe’s
Faust
, in which Faust rejects in the beginning was the Word’ for in the beginning was the Deed’.
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He used this to make the point that the French had clarity of thought but lacked the will to action. Hence France’s need, in the first instance, for a strong state: ‘Nothing effective and solid can be done without the renewal of the state … for that is where it is necessary to begin.’
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The state’s ‘role and
raison d’être
is to serve the general interest’. Only it could personify the whole community, a Leviathan with more than the strength of its composing atoms. It was the centripetal force, balancing the centrifugal forces which, especially in France, threatened general break-up. To de Gaulle, the state was not totalitarian. On the contrary, it symbolized moral and cultural values: especially, in France, idealism, ‘the principal trait in her character and the essential element of her influence’. He identified it with liberty and the classical civilization, seeing French civilization as the democratic civilization
par excellence
, combining a long history of cultural advance with liberty. Democracy at its best brought people together in a consciousness of moral community, what he termed
rassemblement.
Democratic rituals were a concrete symbol of unity. Consensus preceded democratic forms. ‘There is a pact twenty centuries old between the greatness of France and the liberty of the world.’ Hence ‘democracy is inextricably intertwined with the best understood interests of France’.
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