What was Relived in 1958?

Having been firmly convinced by Rudolph Binion’s dazzling and brilliant Hitler Among the Germans (1976) that the Führer and his confederates were indeed driven by a kind of inner compulsion to relive the traumatic shock of defeat that they had experienced in 1918, I find myself much more skeptical about Binion’s present contention that the fall of the Fourth French Republic in 1958 constituted a traumatic reliving of the Third Republic’s 1940 demise. Much of my skepticism centers around the related questions of exactly what was being relived in 1958 and who was doing the reliving.

Whereas the twin German defeats of 1918 and 1945 line up neatly, at least to the eye of this French revolutionary specialist, as closely matched versions of each other, the political/military threat to the Fourth Republic posed by rebellious French forces in 1958 appears as only the thinnest of echoes of the chaos, terror, and demoralization generated by the advancing German army of 1940. Moreover, however much the analogy may have served Tixier-Vignancourt’s immediate political purposes, the “multiple, successive political defeats” suffered by the Fourth Republic would hardly be regarded by most historians of France as being anything close to “equivalent” to the “greatest of all setbacks” that the French suffered at the hands of the Nazi war machine (pp. 17-18). Binion, of course, recognizes the fundamental lack of historical equivalence between a serious domestic crisis and a crushing defeat administered by a foreign army. However, he would no doubt insist, in the face of this rather obvious point, that, whatever criteria historians might invoke in attempting to differentiate significant historical similarities from superficial ones, 1958 was psychologically equivalent to 1940 in the minds of the relevant po-

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litical actors and that these actors were ultimately internally driven to replay the scenario that had been enacted in 1940. But again what was the scenario that was relived in 1958 and who were the relevant actors?

In presenting the proposition that “the fall of France in 1940 was traumatic for the French” (that is to say, “all of France,” including the political leadership) [p. 7], Binion is clearly referring to the specific impact of devastating military defeat. Thus, quoting Robert Paxton, he notes that “the six weeks’ defeat by German armies was a shattering trauma” and, with specific regard to the political establishment, states that “it was reeling from a present, crushing military defeat” (pp. 5, 7). However, when it comes to his discussion of the reliving of the trauma of 1940, it turns out that the trauma that was relived “was not the military debacle of May-June 1940, but the regime suicide that ensued” or, in an alternative formulation, “the regime suicide as a derivative of the military debacle” (p. 12). Now in asserting that regime suicide was the relived trauma, Binion would seem to be advancing the notion that in addition to the traumatization engendered by military defeat that everyone experienced, the political leaders who took part in the humiliating surrender of republican legality and legitimacy to Pétain were further traumatized by the “traumatic sideshow” that unfolded in Bordeaux and Vichy, and that it was this particular “governmental and parliamentary trauma,” not the more general trauma induced by the military debacle, that was relived by the politicians who surrendered to de Gaulle in 1958 (p. 13). But this way of looking at the matter immediately presents some problems.

For one thing, however generally accepted the proposition that “all of France” was traumatized by the 1940 defeat may be among the eminent historians that Binion cites and however justified he may be in concluding from this apparent consensus that he need not provide “elaborate evidencing” for such a proposition (p. 7), the same would hardly be true for what seems to be his own original suggestion that the regime suicide sideshow was a separate source of trauma for the political leadership. While it is certainly plausible and indeed perhaps quite likely that the wrenching and terrifying circumstances in Bordeaux and Vichy that eventuated in the handing over of unlimited powers to Pétain served to further traumatize many of the custodians of the republican flame, one would like to see more evidence of this than a couple of vague quotes about “fear” from Blum and Laval (pp. 4-5). More substantively, even if we grant Binion’s assumptions about the traumatic nature of the 1940 regime suicide, the decisive shift in focus in his paper from the military debacle of 1940 to the parliamentary debacle of 1940 raises serious questions about what he would call the “transmission” of this regime suicide trauma. (The problem of transmission, incidentally, is one that I am fortunate in not having to consider in my own current investigations into the ways in which the trauma induced by the threat of imminent death in summer 1789 impacted the subsequent behavior of early French revolutionary legislators who had been directly exposed to this threat.)

Referring to “the nationwide shock of the German onslaught in 1940,” Binion states that “all of France was traumatized in June-July 1940” (pp. 7, 13). Accepting the general thrust of this idea as
intuitively true, it is relatively easy to see how the 1940 “national trauma of defeat” (p. 13) could, given the proper triggering circumstances, have become an influential factor in determining the course of conduct of the Fourth Republic’s political leadership. For most if not almost all of the political leaders of 1958 had of course lived through 1940 and would therefore have had their own traumatic memories of that time. As for those who had somehow escaped direct exposure to the national trauma, most would have been exposed to the traumatic memories and reactions of family members who had lived through 1940 or, more broadly, to the traumatic narratives of that time that later took shape in French society and culture. (For an illuminating analysis of the process of social construction of “cultural trauma” as a possible means of trauma transmission, see Jeffrey Alexander, “Toward a Theory of Cultural Trauma,” found in Alexander, et. al., Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity [Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004], pp. 1-30.) But since, by Binion’s own account, only the political establishment of 1940 and not “all of France” was traumatized by the sideshow of Third Republic suicide (which was of course the trauma that was

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supposedly relived), I found myself struggling to imagine a credible scenario through which this much less pervasive regime suicide trauma of the political leaders of 1940 might somehow have been transmitted to the 1958 politicos.

Now Binion might well object at this point that the means of transmission of the regime suicide trauma does not matter since he has “always expressly distinguished the known fact of transmission from the unknown means of transmission” (p. 13). But surely the “known fact” to which he is referring here is that transmission of trauma can occur, and it would seem to be the author’s job to provide grounds for persuading the reader that such transmission actually occurred in this particular case. In the absence of at least a plausible hypothesis that might explain how a trauma experienced by a group of politicians in 1940 was transmitted to an almost entirely different group of politicians in 1958, it would seem prudent to assume that, whatever personal dramas de Gaulle may have been enacting or re-enacting in 1958, the surface parallels between the actions of the political leadership of 1940 and the actions of the political leadership of 1958 had little if anything to do with the reliving of a 1940 trauma.

Having said that, Binion’s thesis could perhaps be resuscitated through the hypothesis (which would naturally require some documentation) that the memory of the 1940 regime suicide trauma emerged in the years following the war as a prominent element in the political culture of Fourth Republic parliamentary life. Pending such a demonstration, however, a more banal explanation of the regime suicide of 1958 would seem to be sufficiently serviceable. For faced with rebellious military forces seemingly intent on mounting (or at least carrying matters to the very brink of mounting) a violent coup and politically discredited on many levels, the political leaders of 1958 would seem to have done pretty much the only thing that they could have done short of embracing some version of a blood bath. That the politicians of 1940 had done a similar thing under what amounted to no more than vaguely similar circumstances would not seem to have been something that they were, as Binion would have it, “in total denial” about (p. 18); rather it would seem to have been something that was politically embarrassing and therefore something that they were understandably reluctant to publicly acknowledge, especially in response to the right-wing taunts of Tixier-Vigancourt. Indeed, if 1940 was somewhat of a precedent for 1958, so were 1799 (Napoleon Bonaparte’s coup against the First Republic) and 1851 (Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte’s coup against the Second Republic): in all four cases, the machinations which led to the illegal transfer of power from a parliamentary regime were accompanied by gestures of lip service to the forms of popular sovereignty. (Granted the parliamentarians of 1851 refused to acquiesce in their demise, but it certainly could be argued that a precedent for parliamentary suicide had been established in 1799.) Considering that each of the first three French republics also fell to a militaristic figure with a mythic allure, it would seem to make at least as much sense to read the fall of the Fourth Republic as a reliving of the recurring French fascination with the “man on horseback” than to read it as a reliving of a specific trauma associated with 1940.

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