History Does Not Repeat Itself (response article)

I have read Professor Binion’s provocative essay, “De Gaulle as Pétain” with a good deal of interest and, frankly, a great deal of skepticism. I should stress at the outset that I am not sold on psycho-historical approaches, and I have serious reservations concerning the application of Levi-Strauss’s structuralist paradigms to complex events from recent history. One of the criticisms of structuralism is, of course, its lack of historicity as well as its schematization of complicated human circumstances and situations. Because Professor Binion is dependant precisely on these two approaches in making his arguments, he simplifies and indeed skews the historical record in comparing Pétain’s coming to power in summer 1940 after France’s defeat at the hands of the Nazis, and de Gaulle’s return to power in 1958 at the height of the Algerian crisis.

To be sure, there are interesting—and disturbing—comparisons to be made between these two watershed political moments in postwar France. In both cases, the national assembly voted virtually dictatorial powers to the two military heroes, and in both cases as well, the assembly members were acting under duress in the form of potential military (and other) pressures. They were also acting without receiving strong signs of visible support from “the people,” in fact, as Binion shows, quite the reverse in 1958. In Binion’s view

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at least, the legislators, as well as the French nation itself, were also each time reeling under the weight of terrible military defeats, in 1940 at the hands of the German army and in 1958 at the hands of, primarily, formerly colonized people.

Granting these broad similarities, there are nevertheless equally, and in my view, much more telling historical and political divergences between the two events that easily trump the comparisons. To claim, at least implicitly, that the threat of a possible military coup at the hands of rebellious elements in one’s own army creates the same circumstances as the fact of a military defeat at the hands of one’s traditional enemy, and a fascist enemy at that, strikes me as highly dubious. To appreciate the profound differences between the two experiences in both abstract and concrete terms, one need only consider the continuing trauma in France over the memory of Vichy. No comparable trauma surrounds de Gaulle’s coming to power, nor the legacy of the “regime” he created—today’s Fifth Republic.

Moreover, while de Gaulle can be criticized as vain, arrogant, and even egomaniacal—as was Pétain—and while both men shared a deep-seated dislike of political parties and the chaos of Third and Fourth Republican politics, from there their political visions diverged sharply. Pétain created an overtly dictatorial state, l’État Français, complete with a successor designated by the Marshal in royal fashion, anti-Semitic laws, and a vision of the nation that was reactionary in the extreme and committed to belittling the French people and blaming them for their recent defeat. On the latter score, one need only to watch Claude Chabrol’s disturbing documentary on Vichy’s propaganda, L’Oeil de Vichy, to get a sense of the degree to which the regime sought to humiliate the French in order, in part, to control them. By contrast, de Gaulle, the cantor of French grandeur, was certainly no racist or xenophobe, and despite the claims of many of his critics, exercised no dictatorial ambitions and, in fact, voluntarily resigned when the French people voted down his proposed reforms at the end of the 1960s. The same profoundly democratic outlook and acceptance of the will of the people has certainly not been evident on the part of France’s current president, Jacques Chirac, who clings to power despite a strong vote by the French against the European constitution Chirac championed.

If other political and historical circumstances not discussed by Professor Binion tend to stress strong differences rather than similarities between the events in question, the author’s psycho-historical approach creates other difficulties as well. In the case of de Gaulle himself, Binion reduces France’s most important—and complex—postwar leader to a psychologically simplistic and immature individual bent on symbolic vengeance against Pétain, a vengeance enacted in “replaying” in 1958 Pétain’s coup of summer 1940. Supposedly responding tit for tat for Pétain’s earlier refusal to give de Gaulle full credit for ghost writing a book in the former’s name, de Gaulle, Binion asserts, “plagiarized” Pétain’s political demands of 1940 in making his own demands for returning to power in 1958. So, in fact de Gaulle’s return in 1958 was the “disguised return of Pétain.” While provocatively phrased, this last assertion is in my opinion dangerously misleading in historical terms. So, too, in this context, is Binion’s quoting of de Gaulle’s statement the “France needed both Maréchal Pétain and Général de Gaulle.” Here the statement calls to mind the old—and debunked—claim of former Vichyites in the postwar period that Pétain was “the shield” and de Gaulle “the sword.” Pétain was certainly no “shield” for all the French—especially Jews—against the Nazis. Vichy’s paramilitary police force, the Milice, was created, after all, to fight France’s internal enemies: the Resistance, Jews, and so on.

Professor Binion closes his article with a final claim I find objectionable. He asserts that an “inward impulsion” like de Gaulle’s urge to settle scores belatedly with Pétain, and like the 1958 assembly’s “unconscious” urge to imitate their predecessors by 1940 in handing over power irresponsibly, constitutes the real motor of history. Or as Binion phrases it: “it [the inward impulsion], and it alone, is the active principle of history.” If this is the case, if rationality and even chance play no part, then any effort to control our destiny through positive planning and action is simply a pipe dream. In my view, historical defeatism of this sort is dangerous indeed.

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