The Road to Moscow: De Gaulle and the Kremlin

IN HIS book Adventure in Diplomacy, which is more than ever worth reading in the light of recent events, Kenneth Pendar relates how one evening early in 1943 he found himself seated in a villa in Marrakech between Roosevelt and Churchill. In the course of the dinner he turned to the latter and asked him what he thought of De Gaulle. Churchill looked annoyed. “Oh, let’s don’t speak of him,” he answered gruffly. “We call him Jeanne d’Arc and we’re looking for some bishops to burn him.” It may be some time before we discover just what Churchill’s successor, Harold Macmillan, said some twenty years later after being subjected to another Gaullist rebuff; but no one should be unduly surprised if it turned out that the British Prime Minister had intimated that the bishops had fallen down badly on the job.

De Gaulle’s private lend with Macmillan goes back at least as far as their wartime encounters in Algiers, where Macmillan had the difficult job of acting as Churchill’s personal envoy to the leader of the Free French. In the second volume of his memoirs, De Gaulle tells how on one occasion Macmillan said to Guy de Charbonnières, one of his Free French supporters: “If General de Gaulle today refuses the hand that is proffered him, you should know that America and Britain will abandon him completely and he will be reduced to nothingness.” But twenty years later it was Macmillan, not De Gaulle, who was abandoned.

De Gaulle’s deep-rooted distrust of the British, however, antedates his wartime quarrels with Churchill, Eden, Macmillan, and the host of generals, admirals, and Foreign Office officials he had to contend with. The frustration he suffered during World War I at being cooped up in a German prison fortress for three years while the English and later the Americans mustered the reinforcements necessary to drive the German armies from French soil contributed to his distrust of the British, just as did the duplicities and tergiversations of British policy after the war, from the time of Lloyd George to Stanley Baldwin. In De Gaulle’s conversation with Stalin on December 8, 1944, when he had to explain why he was bent on signing an exclusive FrancoRussian pact instead of the tripartite pact embracing Britain which Churchill had suggested, De Gaulle kept emphasizing the fact that England was a country which “was never in a hurry for the reason that she was a colonial empire and because her people were imbued with a particular spirit.” This spirit was one of persistent and unshakable procrastination — “England always intervened when Germany was already fighting.” England was late in arming in the 1930s. She was late again in the 1950s, when she was offered a chance to become a founder member of, first, the Steel and Coal Community and, later, the Common Market. England, in other words, is a country that always hesitates.

Still, there is obviously something a trifle vindictive and narrow-minded about wanting to punish a country which, after misgivings, finally determines to make up for lost time. For a fuller explanation we must go back to De Gaulle’s Bordeaux speech of September 25, 1949:

Among the peoples of Europe will the German people be present? I reply that notwithstanding all the sorrows and hatreds aroused in millions of human beings, and above all in the French, by the mere mention of Germany, the man of common sense sees the Germans precisely where they are, which is to say, in the center of our continent. He sees them such as they are, which is to say, numerous, disciplined, dynamic, endowed by nature and by their work with a great economic potential, abundantly supplied with coal, equipped for large-scale production despite ruins and dismantlings, capable of rising to the summits of thought, science, and art, once they cease to be led astray by the frenzy of conquest. He also sees Europe amputated, by Soviet domination, of a very vast and precious part of itself. He further sees England moving away, attracted by the transatlantic mass. He concludes that the unity of Europe must, if possible and despite everything, incorporate the Germans.

But to this end reason demands that there one day be a means of establishing between the German people and the French people a direct and practical entente, reflecting the fact that they are complementary in so many respects, and thus overcoming the vicissitudes of history. This, fundamentally, is the heart of the matter. There will or there will not be a Europe, depending on whether or not an accord without intermediaries is or is not possible between Germans and Gauls.

The key to this passage are the two words “without intermediaries,” which define the type of accord De Gaulle then envisaged as essential between the “Germans and Gauls.” Now, why should a Franco-German entente have this exclusive and private character? The British, as De Gaulle knows from experience, are a sober, pragmatic people who cannot be pushed around or swept off their feet by lofty rhetoric, whereas the Germans, shorn of their empire and reduced to fifty million this side of the Iron Curtain, are far more malleable and submissive. De Gaulle admitted as much last December when he told Macmillan at Rambouillet: “Of course, if England comes into the Common Market, it will change everything. As things now are, France can say no — even to Germany. But if England comes in, this will no longer be possible.”

Reduced to its essentials, this amounts to saying that the Common Market must remain under the hegemony of France, which is to say, De Gaulle. The day the British are prepared to accept this claim to hegemony, De Gaulle will be prepared to lift his veto and admit Britain to the club.

EVER since May of last year, when De Gaulle made a significant hint to Walter Lippmann, it had been suspected that the General would be willing to trade British admission to the Common Market in return for London’s agreement to join Paris in the creation of a Franco-British atomic striking force. Following De Gaulle’s press conference of January 14, the French Information Ministry let it be known that De Gaulle had in effect proposed such a joint effort to Macmillan when they met at Rambouillet in December, but that the British Prime Minister had turned down the offer, preferring to fly to Nassau to renew London’s special military ties with Washington. This version of the Rambouillet talks, industriously disseminated by the Gaullist propaganda machine, has been accepted as the gospel truth by thousands of Frenchmen. In fact, however, the closest De Gaulle came to making such an offer was at the end of a review of Anglo-French problems, when he declared that the kind of Franco-British cooperation which had led to plans for the joint production of the Concorde supersonic airplane might be extended to other fields. What fields he did not specify, and Macmillan did not follow up the lead.

As things turned out, every precaution was taken to make it clear to De Gaulle that the offer of Polaris submarines made to Britain at Nassau was open to France as well. The American ambassador in Paris, Charles Bohlen, who had attended the Nassau meeting, was instructed to make this quite clear to the General after the latter had written Kennedy a noncommittal answer to the American invitation. But far from convincing the General, Bohlen was treated to a short lecture in which De Gaulle declared that in acting unilaterally, as it chose to do in last October’s Cuban crisis, Washington had placed the security of the United States before the security of Europe. The fact that this was said before January 1 and repeated almost word for word in his press conference of January 14 suffices to nullify the theory which certain Paris embassies tried to advance that something had happened in those two weeks to make the General change his mind. The truth would seem to be that the General had already made up his mind, and as André Fontaine, the diplomatic editor of Le Monde, pertinently observed in his subsequent review of these events, “one is thus led to think that he saw in the Polaris affair less a reason than a pretext for rupture.”

To anyone except De Gaulle a rupture might seem to be the one thing to be avoided, particularly with such a “good, old, brave people,” as he once termed the British. But premises which appear valid for the general run of humanity do not apply to De Gaulle. His philosophy has always been one of solitary revolt, stubborn refusal, brazen defiance. Where Churchill or Roosevelt — or, for that matter, any politician — speaks quite naturally of a great enterprise, De Gaulle speaks of a grande querelle—that phrase first borrowed from Hamlet’s “Rightly to be great Is . . . greatly to find quarrel in a straw.” To be sure, saying no is a negative performance. But there is dignity in renunciation, and showing the imposter the door, even when the imposter is an old and stouthearted friend, is an action which resounds with the noble accents of tragedy.

IT CANNOT be stressed too often that Charles de Gaulle’s approach to statesmanship is essentially Machiavellian, just as his imagination is essentially historical. “The facts may prove me wrong,” he once declared to his finance minister, Antoine Pinay, “but history will prove me right.” This obsession with history and his own unique position in it pursues him everywhere, and when, in the depths of his lonely meditations, he looks out upon the world, what does he see? He sees fifteen centuries of greatness. “France has been accustomed for fifteen hundred years to being a great power,” he once declared in a speech made in London in 1942. But what, in this mid-twentieth century, is there left for Charles de Gaulle to accomplish which might, in the light of history, stand remote comparison with France’s past achievements?

The answer to this question was hinted at in the General’s press conference of May 15, 1962, when, after lashing out at Europe’s integrated institutions, which he compared slightingly to Volapük and Esperanto, he got around to discussing “the most burning issue in the world at the present time. . . . In the great quarrel which is presently posed, presently nourished by the ambition of the Soviets. Germany is quite naturally the chief stake. In this regard, I must say that as far as we are concerned, we feel that in today’s international situation, characterized by tension, threats, the cold war, it is vain to seek a satisfactory settlement of the problem of Germany. This looks to us like trying to square the circle.”

After developing this theme with respect to the quadripartite statutes governing Berlin, De Gaulle came around to his pet theme of the essential solidarity between France and Germany, concluding his remarks with this significant paragraph:

On this solidarity depends the destiny of all Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals; for it may be that in the West a Europe can be established, a construction, an organization which is firm, prosperous, attractive; then will reappear the possibilities of a European equilibrium with the states of the East and the prospect of a genuine European cooperation, particularly if, in the meantime, the totalitarian regime ceases poisoning the springs. In that case one could and one should, I think, solve the German problem in an objective fashion. In that case, as I have already said and as I now repeat, France would be ready to contribute solid propositions.

What are these “solid propositions” which, after an unspecified lapse of time, will make it possible to square the circle? They were spelled out in some detail in an illuminating article published last January 28 in the Oslo newspaper Arbeiderbladet. According to this article, the Gaullist Grand Design can be summed up as follows: because of internal strains and stresses within the Communist bloc, and particularly because of the mounting tension between Russia and China, the time will come when Moscow will wish for peace on the western front of the cold war. This peace could be attained by effecting a deal whereby the United States would withdraw its troops from Europe in exchange for a simultaneous unification and demilitarization of Germany. Germany would be forced to recognize the OderNeisse frontier; along with Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria would be demilitarized, as well as Yugoslavia, Greece, and Turkey. France and Russia would remain the only two nuclear powers on the continent, and Europe would in effect be subjected to a kind of dual hegemony, with a western sphere under French influence and an eastern sphere under Russian domination. The close cooperation between Western Europe and the United States which has marked the first two post-war decades would be terminated and the NATO alliance quietly buried.

The article, picked up by a number of French and German newspapers, created a small stir in the chancelleries of Western Europe. Its publication even momentarily embarrassed the Norwegian government, since the author of the article, who had signed himself “our Brussels correspondent,” proved to be Per Monsen, the son-inlaw of the Norwegian Foreign Minister.

The Elysée Palace, annoyed by all this publicity, issued a prompt denial which only added to the speculation. The reason for this unprecedented move was obvious: the West Germans could hardly be elated to discover, a week after the solemn signing of a treaty with France, that their pre-assigned role was to be that of a submissive junior partner.

The trouble with Monsen’s allegations is that they were too precise. De Gaulle is a man who usually knows what he wants, but, as his handling of the Algerian conflict demonstrated, he is often vague about just how to get it. A united Germany, even demilitarized, is almost certainly something he does not want, for two cogent reasons. It would create a single block of seventy million Germans, which forty-seven million Frenchmen, even led by De Gaulle, could not dominate; and second, it would almost certainly be unacceptable to the Soviet Union.

But might not something a little less ambitious — say, a demilitarized and independent East Germany with Berlin as its capital — tempt the Russians? What about a solution along the lines of what was achieved in Austria in 1955, one which the German philosopher Karl Jaspers had the courage to advocate several years ago in a series of controversial broadcasts and articles? Who, after all, can predict just what price the German people might be willing to pay to remove the Berlin wall and the concentration camp frontier separating them from their friends and relatives in the East?

WILL this stand as a working hypothesis of why De Gaulle vetoed Britain’s entry into the Common Market? In advancing any serious claim to negotiate the Berlin and German problems, the General knows as well as anyone that he holds very few good cards. His country is only just beginning to recover from the fratricidal dissensions of the Algerian conflict, with a profoundly demoralized army which it will take years and a great dead of money to modernize. The Force de Frappe, based on supersonic Mirage bombers, will not be effective until 1965 at the earliest, and the bombers, whose real efficacy is a matter of dispute among aviation experts, will not be superseded by rockets until 1968 or, more likely, 1970. An agreement for full-scale nuclear cooperation with Britain would undoubtedly have accelerated this timetable; but such an agreement being implicitly denied him, De Gaulle had no choice, from the point of view of his Grand Design, but to play his trump card, the exclusion of Britain from the Common Market.

Britain’s exclusion was interpreted at the time as a weakening of the Western alliance. Undoubtedly it was; but from De Gaulle’s point of view it also represented a strengthening of his hand in the complex poker game he wants to play with the Kremlin. It is in this sense, it seems to me, that one should interpret the subsequent reassurances proffered by the French Prime Minister, Georges Pompidou, and even by De Gaulle himself to the effect that the exclusion of Britain should not be regarded as permanent, but only as a temporary phenomenon. This was a way of hinting to Moscow that De Gaulle has it in his power to keep England out of the Common Market for an almost indefinite period to come.

Since England’s entry into the Common Market would inevitably be followed by the admission of the other members of the “Seven,” the European Economic Community would swell overnight into a massive entity of 300 million producers and consumers, which would exercise a powerful attraction on the satellite countries of Eastern Europe; indeed, even the smaller Common Market of the Six has begun to exert an attraction which is disturbing to the Kremlin and which has taken its most concrete form to date in the recent establishment of a West German trade mission in Warsaw. By blocking this process, even if only temporarily, De Gaulle can stake out a claim to being recognized as an arbiter - a favorite De Gaulle word — in the existing European situation. Conversely, should Moscow refuse to recognize this claim, he can retaliate by lifting his veto on Britain’s admission and letting events take their course.

Ever since last summer, periodic rumors have filtered out of the Elysée Palace to suggest that the General was planning a trip to Moscow. He is in a sense bound to do so, in return tor the trip which Nikita Khrushchev made to France in March of 1960. Such a trip, however, could easily boomerang, much like Adenauer’s abortive pilgrimage to Moscow in 1955, if undertaken precipitately or without proper preparation. This is why De Gaulle seems bent on preceding any journey to Moscow with several “plebiscitary excursions” intended to impress on both Russians and Americans that he speaks not only for France but for a large part of the “uncommitted world.” The first of these would be a grand tour of France’s former African possessions, to be followed, sometime next year, by a second grand tour of Latin America.

This last would have an immediate bearing on American-European relations. De Gaulle hopes that he can persuade the Germans to go along with him in proposing an ambitious program of economic aid to Latin America, a kind of FrancoGerman Marshall Plan, intended, among other things, to rival and undercut the Alliance for Progress. As its chief salesman, De Gaulle could present himself before his Latin-American audiences as a member of the great Latin family, and it would not be difficult for him to suggest that France, the land of Corneille, Victor Hugo, Bizet, and Auguste Comte, has always been sympathetic to the Hispanic world in a way in which AngloSaxons could never be. The resultant hue and cry in Washington over this all but open attack on the Monroe Doctrine would, of course, play straight into the General’s hands, since one of his goals is to maneuver the United States into eventually withdrawing its troops from Europe.

AT FIRST sight this Grand Design looks like the dream of a paranoiac. De Gaulle, we should not forget, has always tended to believe in miracles and shortcuts. His prescription for the “Army of the Future” which he laid down in the early 1930s called for just eight armored divisions and 100,000 men, before whose mechanized tread the tyrants would tremble and robber rulers prudently stay at home. In 1946 he brusquely walked out on his own Cabinet in the confident belief that a clamorous French people would immediately implore him to return; instead, they let him linger in the political wilderness for the next twelve years. In 1958 he returned to power, convinced that his reappearance on the public stage would suffice to bring the Arabs flocking to him with offers of peace. Instead, they continued the struggle for four more years and finally forced him at Evian to agree to a settlement on their terms.

In this connection, we should bear in mind another significant trait in the General’s character, and that is his ferocious determination to be or to appear to be the author of all vital initiatives concerning France and Europe, accompanied by a jealous determination to belittle or sabotage initiatives emanating even from friends or allies. In December of 1944 he flew to Moscow with Georges Bidault and suggested to Stalin that the two should work out an agreement on post-war Germany to be submitted thereafter to Britain and the United States for their endorsement. In August of 1958 he embarked on a trip to French Central Africa in the course of which he abruptly and without warning granted these African colonies immediate independence. He thus contributed enormously to unleashing a grave crisis in the neighboring Belgian Congo, which was totally unprepared for independence. This he might have foreseen but did not. Instead, when the United States prevailed on the United Nations to intervene in an effort to save what could be saved from the resultant anarchy, De Gaulle loftily refused to have anything to do with this last-minute salvage operation.

In March, 1959, he behaved in exactly the same way when Antoine Pinay came to see him with a message from René Payot, the editor of the Journal de Geneve, to the effect that the Algerian rebels were tired of the seemingly hopeless struggle and would be willing to accept practically any terms from the General, provided he would agree to recognize Algeria’s eventual independence, even ten or fifteen years hence. De Gaulle haughtily replied that this would be tantamount to recognizing the F.L.N. as the only “valid interlocutor,” which he had not the slightest intention of doing; furthermore, he added, he would prefer that in the future Monsieur Pinay refrain from busying himself with matters which were not his immediate concern.

There was the same reaction, once again, when General Clay took the initiative in October, 1961, of bringing American tanks up to the Friedrichstrasse checkpoint in Berlin in order to impress on the Russians that the United States meant business in reaffirming the validity of the fourpower statutes. Instructions were given to the French Commandant, General Jean Lacomme, not to cooperate. The initiative, once again, should come from Paris.

This persistent egocentrism is justified, in the case of Berlin, by a Gaullist argument which goes roughly as follows: the United States, being the capitalist country par excellence, is inevitably Soviet Russia’s major adversary and bête noire and is thus unable for psychological reasons successfully to negotiate an end to the cold war. Whenever Americans and Russians sit down at the same conference table, each group arouses the latent hostility and suspicion of the other; there is a head-on clash of wills and opposing national ambitions, and the result is invariably a stalemate.

But if France and Russia were to sit down at a conference table together, it would be an entirely different story. They have the same geographic interests in keeping a rearmed and overpowerful Germany from ever again threatening the continent of Europe. They have historic ties — the Treaty of 1891, which was renewed in the FrancoRussian Pact of 1944, undertaken at the personal initiative of De Gaulle. Finally, France is no longer a capitalistic country. De Gaulle himself was willing to bring five Communists into his government and to nationalize half of French industry in 1944. France today is a semisocialized country, ruled by stale planners and technocrats, and the probability is that this process, far from declining, will advance even further as the years go by. There are, therefore, no fundamental doctrinal obstacles to a meeting of minds between Paris and Moscow.

The General’s indifference to questions of doctrine is, in fact, just about total. In Le Fil de l’Epée, published in 1932, he wrote: “In the ceaseless movement of the world all the doctrines, all the schools, all the revolts have had their hour. Communism will pass. France will not.” Communism, for the General, is not something endemically Russian; and, given time, the Russians, he thinks, will outgrow it. Furthermore, the inevitable economic pressures of mass production and consumption are steadily bringing East and West closer together, with the East growing more liberal and the West more social-minded and collectivist.

The General, furthermore, seems always to have been a collectivist at heart, as this further quotation from Le Fil de l’Epée makes clear:

Today, individualism is in error. Everywhere the need to associate becomes increasingly patent. There is not a trade which is not becoming a corporation. The parties speak only of rules and exclusions. Sport groups its federations and trains its teams. At the same time, the agglomerated and precipitated tempo of life imposes on workshops, offices, and the street a practical discipline whose rigor would have revolted our fathers. Mechanization and the division of labor make new inroads every day against eclecticism and fantasy. Whatever the tasks and the conditions, the nature of things distributes work and leisure in equal portions to all. Education is tending to be unified, housing increasingly uniform. From Sydney to San Francisco, via Paris, clothes are cut according to the same pattern. Even faces are coming to look alike. Without concluding, like Mr. Maeterlinck, that mankind is tending toward the ant heap, it is clear that it disapproves of the independent and the freewheeling. The army has only to take advantage of this evolution.

Time, it is clear, has not altered the General’s fundamental convictions in this respect. In his last New Year’s message to the French people he could look forward with hope to a modern France which “could well number 100 million inhabitants.” He will not live to see this overpopulated France, and for the time being he must content himself with a masse de manoeuvre of 100 million Franco-Germans in order to carry his campaign to Moscow. To engage in this exalted duel with the Kremlin he needs a disciplined army at his beck and call, and, if necessary, he is prepared to go quite a long way to give it a properly regimented look, capable of impressing the heirs of Karl Marx. This is one explanation for his repeated intimations that he intends to launch his country on a frankly socialistic and welfare-state course — if France’s still precarious balance of payments will allow it. In his press conference of last January he hinted, once again, at the necessity of associating labor and management in the running of enterprises, and last November, on the morrow of his election triumph, he was quoted by the Gaullist weekly, Candide, as declaring, with reference to the last-minute alliance engineered between Guy Mollet’s Socialists and Maurice Thorez’s Communists: “I’ll go further than their Front Populaire.”

In 1960 he startled the then head of his military household, General Grout de Beaufort, by blandly declaring: “The evolution toward Communism is inevitable. It is the sense of history. It would be absolutely foolish to want to oppose it. However, to reach its present state, the U.S.S.R. had to pass through unspeakable sufferings. This transition period can be spared France, provided that it is I who introduces Communism. . . . Needless to say, none of the existing economic or social structures will ever return. Such a policy presupposes a reversal of alliances.”

To what extent was De Gaulle speaking seriously, to what extent was he exaggerating when he made this startling statement? It is impossible to say. Grout de Beaufort chose to interpret it seriously, and it helped precipitate his resignation. This may have been De Gaulle’s intention, though it is difficult to see exactly what he had to gain by having these remarks bruited all over Paris.

It is also difficult to see how the profession of socialistic or collectivist sympathies of this kind is going to further the maintenance of the FrancoGerman Pact, since Erhard’s Germany is, for the foreseeable future, committed to a large measure of free enterprise. This pact, indeed, gives all the signs of eventually proving just about as abortive as the Franco-Russian Pact of 1944, which did not keep Stalin from doing exactly what he wanted with Poland and which the Soviet Union formally denounced when West Germany entered NATO in 1954; a pact which failed to get De Gaulle invited either to Yalta or Potsdam, and which did not prevent the French Communists from openly opposing his ideas for a new French Constitution, thus precipitating his resignation in January of 1946.

ALL this may sound fantastic, but it is the kind of fantasy which appeals to De Gaulle. His is a policy which embraces grave risks, but risks are something he has never recoiled from. He is and always has been something of a gambler, and one of his French critics, writing last year under the pseudonym of Michel Dacier, referred in the Écrits de Paris to his “romantic love of catastrophe.” He has a tightrope walker’s love for the vertigo of vast heights, and he has never made a secret of his conviction that he is a man predestined to be a providential savior. Peace and tranquillity hold little charm for him, just as the practical, the humdrum, the possible have never really interested him. It is, on the contrary, the impossible, the unheard-of enterprise, the seemingly unobtainable objective which have always haunted his imagination. It is more than likely that he would not have shown himself so prone to abandon Algeria but for the noisy clamor which brought him to power in 1958 and which seemed to make Algeria’s abandonment more unthinkable than ever. Those in France who believe that he secretly wants the Comte de Paris to succeed him base their hypothesis on this psychological quirk. For what, in a country which has been republican for the last ninety years, could seem less likely than a monarchical restoration? By the same token, what, in a Europe divided between two hostile blocs, could seem more improbable than a Franco-German-Russian bloc against the Yellow Peril in the East?

Extravagant and fanciful though all this may seem, it would be a grave error to underestimate De Gaulle’s capacity for trying to carry out his plan. The General has maneuvered himself into a position where he can practice diplomatic blackmail on a formidable and frightening scale. Should the Franco-German alliance turn sour, he can threaten to break up the Common Market by way of retaliation. This would not be difficult to do, since he did not favor its establishment in the first place and has on several occasions opened fire on Europe’s integrated institutions. The collapse of the Common Market would simply justify his past objections. History, once again, would have proved him right.

At the same time, the General can always renew his overtures for nuclear collaboration with Britain, in the fond hope that the humiliation at Nassau will eventually make London more receptive to such a deal. Finally, he has it in his power, should everything else fail and should Bonn contest his claim to leadership, to encourage the Russians to maintain the present division of Germany, making, if necessary, a trip to Moscow to underscore this tacit agreement. And if the worst should come to the worst, he can declare that the West Germans have proved unworthy of their great Chancellor, who was bent on burying the age-old enmity between Germans and Gauls. The anti-German faucet will be quietly turned on and the Gaullist propaganda machine geared to exploit the latent Germanophobia of the French, just as last January the anti-British faucet was opened and the country flooded with a deluge of “perfidious Albion” insinuations.

The big conundrum remains: how will Moscow react to these overtures and changing situations? No one can say for sure. The Russians are realists and know that no Berlin settlement can be made without American agreement. But they also know that Charles de Gaulle is seventy-two years old and that time is running out.

Five years ago, in August of 1958, he embarked on a trip which gave the French African states their independence. In the Caravelle that was carrying him over another lap of his enfranchising marathon, he asked Bernard Cornut-Gentille, the former French high commissioner for West Africa, what he thought of his policy: “Mon Général,” Cornut-Gentille answered after a moment’s hesitation, “don’t you think you’re going a little fast?” “Perhaps,” replied De Gaulle. “But then, I’m sixty-seven and I don’t have much time.”