Thoughts on Binion’s “De Gaulle as Pétain”

I enjoyed Rudolph Binion’s brisk, energetic and provocative narrative of the falls of the Third and Fourth Republics, but I also have a number of hesitations that, due to the limitations of time, must be addressed in rapid succession.

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First, Professor Binion states that the great republican march on 28 May 1958 was “against de Gaulle”—this is perhaps too broad a claim, when speaking of nearly 200,000 participants. More nuanced, I think, is Jean-Pierre Rioux’s conclusion, in his authoritative work on the Fourth Republic, that the march was instead directed more against “the paras [paratroopers] and ‘fascists’” in Algeria than de Gaulle (The Fourth Republic: 1944-1958 [Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1987], p. 308). Similarly, Professor Binion claims, with no documents in hand, that de Gaulle, in his meeting with President Coty, agreed to an appearance before the National Assembly only after “much wrangling” (p. 2). Yet according to de Gaulle’s Memoires d’espoir, he and Coty “reached an understanding at once” (Quoted in Jean Lacouture, De Gaulle: The Ruler: 1945-1970 [NY: W.W. Norton, 1994], p. 175). While de Gaulle’s version is of course de Gaulle’s, I would like to learn of conflicting accounts if Professor Binion knows of any. Professor Binion also dismisses as “contrived” de Gaulle’s assertion that “France’s troubles, Algeria inclusive, were all attributable to the nature” of the Fourth Republic (p. 2). Yet most contemporary and retrospective accounts cite the structural inadequacies of the Fourth Republic as a primary cause of the political immobilisme that was made fatal by the Algerian question.

Now, these reservations may well be quibbles. Yet I mention them because they seem symptomatic of a larger and more problematic interpretative approach, one that strikes me as invariably hostile or dismissive of de Gaulle (with whom, I must add, I do not share a particularly deep ideological kinship). Professor Binion avers that there is a “basic equivalence” between Pétain and de Gaulle’s assumptions of power because both men used national crises to destroy, respectively, the Third and Fourth Republics. Yet it is surely important to recall that Pétain (and his erstwhile collaborator, Pierre Laval) had no intention of maintaining republican institutions or values, while de Gaulle explicitly committed himself to doing so. It is, in this respect, telling that Professor Binion relegates to a footnote the six-month limit on the use of special powers accepted by de Gaulle—a limitation that was non-existent for Pétain and his Etat français—and ignores the fact that de Gaulle’s cabinet, stocked with republican notables, emphasized continuity, not rupture with the past.

Finally, there is Professor Binion’s assertion that de Gaulle’s rise to power in 1958 was a deliberate “restaging” of his “own specific sideshow, Pétain’s intended theft of his identity in 1928” (p. 11). The reference here is to the squabbles between the two men that spanned the years 1928-1938 and concerned their respective roles in the writing of the book that de Gaulle ultimately published as La France et son armée. It may well reveal my own inadequacies as a student of psychohistory, but I simply do not see any evidence for the claim that de Gaulle remained emotionally dissatisfied even after his declaration of independence from Pétain’s patronage in 1938. Not only is there the absence of any proof for Professor Binion’s assertion that the book’s publication in 1938 “did not placate [de Gaulle] down in the deep dark depths where grudges fester” (p. 10), but as far as I can tell, there is the absence of any narrative or interpretive need for such a claim. To state with Professor Binion that de Gaulle’s festering grudge led him to “literally [take] a leaf from Pétain’s historic book when he demanded the same constituent powers as Pétain in 1940 in the same terms as Pétain in 1940 while refusing to acknowledge Pétain as his source” (p. 10) strikes me as a clever gloss but dubious history. That France still enjoys political life under the constitution of the Fifth (i.e., de Gaulle’s) Republic reminds us, contrary to Professor Binion’s claim, that the two men did not demand the same constituent powers. Moreover, the proper contextualization of events in 1940 and 1958 reveal that these powers simply were not demanded in the same terms. Finally, there is the ostensible refusal by de Gaulle to acknowledge Pétain as his source. Let me suggest that he may have done so for the very good, though pedestrian reason that an abiding concern for a stable form of republican government, and not settling an old score with Pétain, was the source of his actions.

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