Charles de Gaulle’s press conferences were theatrical occasions. The government sat in a special enclosure beside the stage on which the leader of the Free French and founder of the Fifth Republic presided. Questions were carefully planted. The nation followed the leader’s pronouncements on television. On 14th January 1963, a month after talks at the Château de Rambouillet, during which Harold Macmillan had pressed Britain’s application to join the six-nation European Common Market, the General delivered his veto in front of 500 people at the Élysée Palace. Britain’s entry, he said, would create a “colossal Atlantic Community dependant on and led by America, which would soon absorb the European Community.”
What if he had taken the opposite tack and announced that he welcomed the country which had given him a haven when he raised the flag of resistance to the armistice of 1940 and Vichyite collaboration, and thus began his ascent to the status of the man his compatriots today rank, according to polls, as the greatest of French figures? It has been a fond dream of British Europhiles but it runs up against the reality of national politics and, even more, of one determined personality.
The talks with Macmillan had not pre-disposed the French President to sweet reason. He had found little common ground and one major cause for disagreement with the Prime Minister, whose main achievement was to have bagged 77 pheasants at a shoot before the discussions. “I thought the discussions about as bad as they could be from the European point of view,” Macmillan noted, attributing his host’s attitude both to his temperament and to his “personal and almost despotic control of France.” He said later that the Frenchman was crazy. As for de Gaulle, he told a Cabinet meeting that his visitor, “the poor man,” had appeared so sad and downcast that he wanted to put his hand on his shoulder and intone the words of the Edith Piaf song of the time, Ne pleurez pas, milord (Don’t cry, my lord).
For the Frenchman to have relented, Macmillan would have to have retreated on a major cause of discord—his decision to conclude an agreement at a summit with President Kennedy under which the United States would sell Britain its Polaris underwater missile technology, creating just the kind of dependency on Washington which de Gaulle vehemently rejected. Instead, he told Macmillan that Britain must relinquish its special ties with the US, and proposed nuclear cooperation to enhance Europe’s independent military capacity.
What if Macmillan had decided to take the Gaullist course (assuming that he had been able to sell it to his own Cabinet)? It is conceivable the General would have taken a more emollient line at his press conference. But he had another trick up his sleeve.
Eight days after he had delivered his veto to Britain, he and Chancellor Konrad Adenauer signed the Franco-German friendship treaty, western Europe’s most important postwar bilateral agreement. Would de Gaulle have made it a threesome? Exceedingly unlikely. He was well aware of the danger of being outflanked by a coalition of pro-Atlantic West Germans, such as Adenauer’s deputy Ludwig Erhard, and federalists led by the Belgians and Dutch, who rejected France’s vision of European construction respecting state sovereignty in its Gaullist form.
So Britain would have found itself alienated from Washington and as a junior partner in a community led by Paris in which it would have faced a continuous grind of negotiations in Brussels on agricultural and other thorny dossiers. And that wouldn’t have been all. As he moved through his seventies, de Gaulle became ever more intent on asserting the independence of the country of which he said he had a “certain idea.” That meant, above all, resisting what Paris denounced as “American hegemony.” De Gaulle took France out of Nato’s integrated military structure and became a fierce critic of the war in Vietnam.
It is hard to see governments in London, whether Conservative or Labour, going along with this. Eventually, in 1971, Edward Heath and the General’s successor, Georges Pompidou, reached the accord that allowed for Britain’s entry into Europe. But the pragmatic Pompidou was not his erstwhile master.
So long as the man who knew the power of saying “no,” be it in 1940 or 1963, was ruling France, the door was shut. Britain’s Atlanticist sentiments as personified by Macmillan clashed with de Gaulle’s insistence that Europe must be led from the Élysée. This added to de Gaulle’s perennial suspicion of the nation across the Channel. By their own lights, both were right. Some deals are not to be made in the real world.
Jonathan Fenby is the author of “The General: Charles de Gaulle and the France He Saved” (Simon & Schuster)
What if he had taken the opposite tack and announced that he welcomed the country which had given him a haven when he raised the flag of resistance to the armistice of 1940 and Vichyite collaboration, and thus began his ascent to the status of the man his compatriots today rank, according to polls, as the greatest of French figures? It has been a fond dream of British Europhiles but it runs up against the reality of national politics and, even more, of one determined personality.
The talks with Macmillan had not pre-disposed the French President to sweet reason. He had found little common ground and one major cause for disagreement with the Prime Minister, whose main achievement was to have bagged 77 pheasants at a shoot before the discussions. “I thought the discussions about as bad as they could be from the European point of view,” Macmillan noted, attributing his host’s attitude both to his temperament and to his “personal and almost despotic control of France.” He said later that the Frenchman was crazy. As for de Gaulle, he told a Cabinet meeting that his visitor, “the poor man,” had appeared so sad and downcast that he wanted to put his hand on his shoulder and intone the words of the Edith Piaf song of the time, Ne pleurez pas, milord (Don’t cry, my lord).
For the Frenchman to have relented, Macmillan would have to have retreated on a major cause of discord—his decision to conclude an agreement at a summit with President Kennedy under which the United States would sell Britain its Polaris underwater missile technology, creating just the kind of dependency on Washington which de Gaulle vehemently rejected. Instead, he told Macmillan that Britain must relinquish its special ties with the US, and proposed nuclear cooperation to enhance Europe’s independent military capacity.
What if Macmillan had decided to take the Gaullist course (assuming that he had been able to sell it to his own Cabinet)? It is conceivable the General would have taken a more emollient line at his press conference. But he had another trick up his sleeve.
Eight days after he had delivered his veto to Britain, he and Chancellor Konrad Adenauer signed the Franco-German friendship treaty, western Europe’s most important postwar bilateral agreement. Would de Gaulle have made it a threesome? Exceedingly unlikely. He was well aware of the danger of being outflanked by a coalition of pro-Atlantic West Germans, such as Adenauer’s deputy Ludwig Erhard, and federalists led by the Belgians and Dutch, who rejected France’s vision of European construction respecting state sovereignty in its Gaullist form.
So Britain would have found itself alienated from Washington and as a junior partner in a community led by Paris in which it would have faced a continuous grind of negotiations in Brussels on agricultural and other thorny dossiers. And that wouldn’t have been all. As he moved through his seventies, de Gaulle became ever more intent on asserting the independence of the country of which he said he had a “certain idea.” That meant, above all, resisting what Paris denounced as “American hegemony.” De Gaulle took France out of Nato’s integrated military structure and became a fierce critic of the war in Vietnam.
It is hard to see governments in London, whether Conservative or Labour, going along with this. Eventually, in 1971, Edward Heath and the General’s successor, Georges Pompidou, reached the accord that allowed for Britain’s entry into Europe. But the pragmatic Pompidou was not his erstwhile master.
So long as the man who knew the power of saying “no,” be it in 1940 or 1963, was ruling France, the door was shut. Britain’s Atlanticist sentiments as personified by Macmillan clashed with de Gaulle’s insistence that Europe must be led from the Élysée. This added to de Gaulle’s perennial suspicion of the nation across the Channel. By their own lights, both were right. Some deals are not to be made in the real world.
Jonathan Fenby is the author of “The General: Charles de Gaulle and the France He Saved” (Simon & Schuster)
