Extreme Right-Wing Reactions to Charles de Gaulle's "Memoires de Guerre": A Scene from the French Civil War

Abstract

This article deals with an episode in the history of extreme rightwing hostility towards Charles de Gaulle during the post-war period. By focusing on the responses of extreme right-wingers (monarchists and reactionary traditionalists, authoritarian nationalists, and fascists) to the publication of the first volume of de Gaulle's war memoirs in 1954, it illustrates the extent to which the meaning of the war, and more particularly of the division between Vichy and the Free French, continued to haunt those whose political identity in the present was tied to the events of that traumatic period in the past. The arguments used by these writers were not unfamiliar. They had been rehearsed on previous occasions, but the publication of the memoirs provided a particular spur to air them again as widely as possible, since de Gaulle was de Gaulle and his book asserted a very different view of Vichy from their own. However, there were also signs that times were changing, and that at least some on the extreme right wished to move on--though not at the price of recanting. Paradoxically the attacks on de Gaulle's book were often made in the name of an appeal to national unity and reconciliation as the necessary basis for France's future strength. The Context of the Episode It has to be supposed that, for de Gaulle, publishing his memoirs was not simply a matter of setting out his perception of the momentous events of the relatively recent past, and his own extraordinary part in them. It was also proof that he was the leader who could, and should, shape the nation's path towards renewed greatness in the post-war era. It formed part of an ongoing activity of self-representation, of reminding the public of who he was and what he was. Admittedly, at the time of completing the first volume he was placed at a greater distance from power than he had ever been since his resignation from the presidency of the Provisional Government in 1946, and he may have held little hope that events would turn his way in the near future. His attempt to use a mass movement, the Rassemblement du Peuple Frangais, as