The summary of Julian Jackson’s reading of de Gaulle is the section title of Part Four of this monumental biography: “Republican Monarch.” It is not an entirely original thought, but Jackson puts the case consistently and compellingly. The crisis of legitimacy and executive authority in the Third and the Fourth Republics is contrasted by Jackson with de Gaulle’s austere monarchist-sympathizing upbringing, the consistent bend of his thoughts, and the active policy of his own time in power.
The problem Jackson articulates is, essentially, that France had never come to terms with the first loss of its monarchy. The net result of this was that governments struggled to exercise effective executive power, becoming mired in procedure and faction, leading to near-perpetual instability. This is seen through the eyes of de Gaulle, who as far back as the First World War had identified the issues he would seek to solve in 1958 as he gained semi-revolutionary power. In 1915, de Gaulle lambasts the “odious and stupid” “rabble” of the Parliament for their poor, interfering management of the War. While in a German prison camp from 1916–1918 he articulates the different stages of management of the war, praising the period of “extremely salutary” Parliamentary oversight from 1915–16 (a reversal of his contemporary view), but identifying the time-wasting inefficiency of Parliament’s efforts after that date, where parliamentary commissions and administration sucked up time and dissipated focus. This can be seen as a shorthand for his entire view of French politics during the Third and Fourth Republics, though he expressed himself even more strongly at times. Indeed, the very reason de Gaulle left executive office in 1946 was because he refused to lead a weak executive. He required real and unilateral power to effect change.
This judgement of de Gaulle’s—that France needed a strong executive power, and that it lacked one in virtue of the loss of the monarchy—can be explained by at least three factors beyond the hard experience of seeing Government after Government struggle and fall in front of him (the Third Republic saw eighty-six Prime Ministerial tenures serve in sixty-nine years of that office’s existence; the Fourth Republic saw twenty-one tenures in eleven years; somewhat comically, many Prime Ministers served multiple terms, with what seems at times to have been an official revolving door policy). The three factors I mean are: de Gaulle’s monarchist upbringing; his own autocratic personality; and his belief in politics as the art of responding to contingency. All of these are established early on his life—the importance of contingency is first mentioned in his camp notebooks, by a quote from Boutroux: “Contingency is the characteristic of what might not have been or could have been different.”
We see his autocratic personality exemplified in many ways—certainly by his bullying behavior, by his fury at attempts to undercut him, and by his practiced “obscurity,” where no one could quite tell what he thought or was going to do, leaving him in full control. Both the second and third qualities are perhaps best exemplified by his “escape” of 29 May 1968 during the street revolutions of the Paris students and workers. He deigned to tell no one of his whole plan beforehand, and told his Prime Minister and Cabinet nothing at all. He left Paris, flying to Germany to meet army chiefs, meanwhile moving his son’s family to a point of distance from the chaos. Was he planning to resign at the start of the day? Was he seeking to procure military assistance in crushing the riots? No one quite knows. What we know is that he felt he had lost control, and wanted it back again, and this dramatic disappearance was the means to put himself at the helm. Jackson sums up his motives thus: “above all he wanted to escape from the Elysée, free himself from his Prime Minister, and make himself a central actor after several days of being sidelined by him.” De Gaulle used mystery here to assert power. It was one of his recurrent stratagems (and infuriating to his allies).
The monarchical sympathies are clear, as is his application of contingency to them. He was raised in a conservative Catholic, monarchist family which took a pragmatic approach to civic affairs—his father, who taught in an ever-pressured Catholic school, described himself as “a monarchist in feeling and a republican in thought.” Charles would often answer, when asked in later life who his greatest influence or hero was, “My father, who was the best man I have ever known.” At heart, it seems de Gaulle really wanted the monarchy back. Even as President, de Gaulle would meet with the Comte de Paris, the Legitimist heir to the French throne, and repeatedly assured that affable old buffer that France needed its King back. In 1961, he told the Comte that “France is gently returning to its old and traditional monarchy”; in 1962, he suggested the Comte prepare to succeed him after his (presumably near) retirement; in 1966, he mixed realism with continued allegiance: “Personally I would have liked the monarchy, you know my views about this. You are the king … But I don’t think it is possible.” De Gaulle told his crony Peyrefitte that the Comte “encapsulates in his person the forty kings who made France” even if “he no longer corresponds to this century.”
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