1968 - Mark Kurlansky [124]
This was the three-hundredth time the law had been invoked since de Gaulle became president. In one case a man was fined 500 francs for shouting, “Retire!” as de Gaulle’s car passed.
If the French said they were pleased with de Gaulle’s foreign policy, almost no one else was. His peculiar brand of nationalism seemed to threaten most international organizations. The year 1967 had been particularly difficult, or at least a year in which he had been particularly difficult. He withdrew French forces from NATO, a formerly French-based organization, and threatened the survival of the European Common Market when for the second time he blocked British entry to the group. His famous statement after the Six Day War about Jews being a “domineering” people alienated French and American Jews and Gentiles. He even alienated Canadians by endorsing Québécois separatism from the town hall balcony in Montreal while on a state visit to Canada.
“It is clear to everyone that in de Gaulle the United States is dealing with an ungrateful four-flusher whose hand should have been called years ago,” Gordon McLendon of Dallas said on his eight radio stations. Throughout the United States there were calls for boycotting French products. When a Gallup poll asked Americans to rate which countries they liked, France was near the bottom of the list, beating only Egypt, Russia, North Vietnam, Cuba, and the People’s Republic of China. In a poll in which the British were asked to pick the most villainous man of the twentieth century, Hitler came in first but was followed by Charles de Gaulle, who beat out Stalin. In fourth place was British prime minister Harold Wilson. The usually good-humored West German foreign minister, Willy Brandt, said in early February that de Gaulle was “obsessed with power,” though he was quickly forced to apologize for the remark.
Nor did all criticism come from outside of France, despite de Gaulle’s tendency to prosecute. French of the next generation, the generation of John Kennedy, who should have been taking over, were anxious for their turn. This included fifty-two-year-old socialist François Mitterrand, who was still in line behind sixty-one-year-old Pierre Mendès-France, the leftist former head of government who had earned the contempt of the Right when he withdrew the French military from France’s Vietnam war. But there were also new faces. While America’s New Left was reading translations of Camus, Fanon, and Debray, France also produced a book for the establishment. A 1967 bestseller in France, Le Défi Américain by Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber, the publisher of the slightly left-of-center weekly newsmagazine L’Express, was translated into English and in 1968 became an American bestseller known as The American Challenge. Servan-Schreiber looked to a post–de Gaulle era and his ambitions for himself in that world. His one run for elected office in 1962, a campaign for a National Assembly seat, was disastrous. But if political careers are launched with books, this one had a rare success. In France in its first three months it broke all postwar sales records. Servan-Schreiber’s thesis was that in the next thirty years the United States would become so dominant that Europe would be little more than a colony. The European Common Market, despite the fact that on July 1, 1968, customs between member countries would cease, was failing to move forward fast enough and would disintegrate from lack of momentum.
The message of this book, often quoted in 1968 by European diplomats and entrepreneurs, was that Europe would have to become like America or would be eaten up by it. American companies, with $14 billion invested in Europe, were taking over. He warned that in the next thirty years they would all be living in what was called “the post-industrial society.” He added, “We should remember this term, for it defines our future.” Among the other prescient predictions: “Time and space will no longer be a problem in communications” and “The gap between high and low salaries in the post-industrial