1968 - Mark Kurlansky [125]
He quotes a White House expert predicting, “Well before 1980, computers will be small, powerful, and inexpensive. Computing power will be available to anyone who needs it, or wants it, or can use it. In many cases the user will have a small personal console connected to a large, central computing facility where enormous electronic memories will store all aspects of knowledge.”
The book was a warning: “America today still resembles Europe—with a fifteen-year head start. She belongs to the same industrial society. But in 1980 the United States will have entered another world, and if we fail to catch up, the Americans will have a monopoly on know-how, science, and power.”
Servan-Schreiber foresaw, though his timetable was a little fast, the dangers of America as a singular superpower. “If Europe, like the Soviet Union, is forced out of the running, the United States will stand alone in its futuristic world. This would be unacceptable for Europe, dangerous for America and disastrous for the world. . . . A nation holding a monopoly of power would look on imperialism as a kind of duty, and would take its own success as proof that the rest of the world should follow its example.”
To Servan-Schreiber there was little time and one major obstacle in the path of France’s and Europe’s modernization: a septuagenarian nineteenth-century general. “De Gaulle is from another time, another generation,” said the forty-four-year-old editor who had flown a fighter for Free France during World War II. “He is irrational in a time that cries for rationality.” Even the General’s favorite pose, of the World War II hero, was wearing thin. Servan-Schreiber said, “I disapprove of heroes. Children who worship Batman grow up to vote for heroes. I hope that after de Gaulle the Europeans will be sick of heroes.”
Servan-Schreiber represented a middle generation of Frenchmen, tired of the elderly de Gaulle but distrustful of the new youth culture. “I want my sons to grow up to be citizens of something that is important. I don’t want them to be second class. A twenty-five-year-old with nothing to be proud of does stupid things like becoming a hippie or going to Bolivia to fight with the guerrillas or putting up a Che Guevara poster on his wall.” Bored and suffocating France had two generation gaps: one between the World War II generation and their children, and the other between General de Gaulle and most of France.
De Gaulle’s ten-year-old Fifth Republic and the protest movement that was about to consume the society where nothing was happening, both had their roots in Algerian independence. The French colony of Algeria, home to de Gaulle’s Free French government-in-exile for a time during the war, began demanding its independence as soon as the war ended. It was the struggle of Algeria that inspired the writing of Frantz Fanon and greatly shaped the anti-imperialist movement of the 1960s. Mendès-France, who decolonized Indochina and Tunisia, could not get the political muscle to let go of Algeria. Although almost constant local resistance continued from the moment France took over in 1848, a million Frenchmen lived there, many for generations, and the French considered Algeria to be theirs. The French army, humiliated by the Germans and then humiliated by the Vietnamese, felt Algeria to be their final and non-negotiable stand.
At this point France was supposed to have been through with de Gaulle. After World War II he had considered it his mission to “save” France from the Left. In order to do this, he fostered the myth of the brave France resisting the Nazi occupier. In reality the bulk of the French resistance had been