Given recent events involving the President of France, I couldn’t help reflecting upon past Presidents of that nation and recalled a review by Peter Hitchens of a biography of France’s most famous President: De Gaulle.

If you’re familiar with Christopher’s religious brother then you’ll already guess that the “melancholy, long, withdrawing roar” of Christianity from Britain feeds his sad, mournful paeans to his dead and dying past.

Of course there are similar pasts to this on the European continent as well, and Hitchens uses this opportunity to repeat the same maudlin attitude, in his review: A Certain Idea of France. Not that he’s going to let Jackson or his subject off the hook entirely, kicking off the review with this:

Using pick handles and rifle butts, the police force of one of the world’s most civilized countries surrounded and savagely beat hundreds of dark-skinned men. They then threw them into the beautiful river that flows through a city celebrated for its cultural and artistic wonders. Those who were still alive after the beatings were left to drown.

This was Paris, City of Lights, on the night of October 17, 1961. To this day, nobody knows how many peaceful Algerian protesters died in this episode, concealed for years by menacing state power and a ­compliant press. Most estimates are in the hundreds.

I confess I’d never heard of this event, not being much of a follower of France, its post-WWII history or its politics. Not only that but De Gaulle struck me, long after his death, as a pompous, arrogant figure who just could not accept France’s diminished status in the world. Winston Churchill fought the same fight in the 1920’s, but by the end of WWII had recognised the inevitable.

De Gaulle never did, to the end of his days. Naturally enough Hitchens finds that admirable, and perhaps in terms of stoic courage it is. The biography sounds superb and given that it’s not a history I follow, I think I’ll get it.

But the parts of the review that I thought relevant to today was where he talks about De Gaulle in relation to both the USA and the so-called European Community. While he personalised his fights, De Gaulle knew he was fighting something a lot bigger than one US President.

De Gaulle’s quarrel with ­Roosevelt was based on real loathing. Washington’s vision for postwar Europe, in which the old nations would be diminished and homogenized, was directly opposed to de Gaulle’s idea of a French resurrection in glory and might. Washington loved and promoted the idea of a Europe dominated by supranational bodies, and would later use Marshall aid and the CIA to spread the idea of a European union.
…
In the hard and non-satirical world, the U.S. also worked ceaselessly to bring an end to the European empires of Britain and France, a cause born out of dogmatic anti-­colonialism. In an American-­dominated world, those empires, including French Algeria, viewed by Frenchmen as part of their country, were doomed.

That’s quite a different viewpoint from the common wisdom served up in my lifetime, where the USA was the aider and abetter of these old colonial powers and their 3rd World machinations. Then there’s Europe, where the same personal/political fights existed for De Gaulle:

In May 1962, de Gaulle would oppose to this his assertion that Europe could not be real “without France and her Frenchmen, Germany and her Germans, Italy and her Italians.” He said (a recording of the performance still exists) that Dante, Goethe, and Chateaubriand “belong to Europe,” precisely because they spoke and wrote as Italians, Germans, or Frenchmen. They would not, he jeered, have served Europe much if they had been stateless and had written in some form of ­Esperanto or Volapük.

Shades of the joke about an EU soccer team. But he turned these arguments into actions too:

Where he could, he continued to act as if he led a sovereign country. He marched France out of the NATO military command. He took Common Market money but acted as if that body had no power over him at all. He particularly despised efforts to form a European Army, and ruthlessly excluded Germany from nuclear weapons research. He spent billions on nuclear weapons which, one must suspect, were targeted as much on Germany as on the U.S.S.R. In his final few months in power, in February 1969, he astonished the British ambassador to Paris, Christopher Soames, with a plan to dilute the Treaty of Rome and put a stop to the European Community’s ambitions for a continental superstate.

In the end of course, he lost. Not just in being booted from power in the midst of the huge French protests of 1968 – which ultimately were very much against him and what he represented – but in seeing his ideas ignored by his successors, particularly François Mitterrand, his old rival.

[Mitterrand] wholly rejected the general’s belief in an enduring, sovereign France. ­Mitterrand had been decorated by Pétain’s collaborationist Vichy government, and like many intelligent Frenchmen, saw 1940 as a moment of truth that France could not thereafter ignore.

De Gaulle’s certain idea of France was replaced by the EU, and it would seem that even in Britain after the Brexit split from Europe that nation is still fated to go the same way – certainly if Starmer and company have anything to do with it. Hitchens suffers from too much pathos, but the final paragraph should very much strike a chord in the heart of any Brexit voter:

In his fall, many others fell. It was the last brave attempt to raise an ancient banner.

Actually those ancient banners are to be to torn down, as in France’s old enemy:

AfD representatives have asserted, for example, that Germans have a cultural history tied to their ethnic and national identity; that this history and identity deserve protection; and that unchecked illegal migration threatens national cohesion.

As a result the AfD has been deemed a “right-wing extremist party” by the country’s intelligence agency, the BfV and one consequence is that, against all previous conventions for such a large party, it has been denied the usual allottment of committee chairmanships and vice chairmanships – including those of powerful committees dealing with the budget, interior affairs, and finance.

The far-left Die Linke (the Left) party, which had garnered just 9 percent of the parliamentary vote, was awarded two chairs.

Of course.