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By Root 837 0

émicycle of the Palais Bourbon. A week later the Assembly was to vote on whether to re-elect de Gaulle as head of government. It also happened to be the day that de Gaulle invited Winston Churchill to lunch. Churchill was passing through Paris on his way to the south of France, for a holiday after his defeat by Labour. The party consisted of the de Gaulles, Captain Guy (de Gaulle’s faithful aide-de-camp), Palewski, Churchill and his daughter Mary, and Duff and Diana Cooper. ‘I never liked or admired [de Gaulle] so much,’ recorded Duff Cooper in his diary. ‘He was smiling, courteous, almost charming, and on this day and almost at the hour when his whole future was at stake, not only was he perfectly calmbut one might have thought he was a country gentleman living far away from Paris. There were no interruptions, no telephone calls or messages, no secretaries hurrying in and out, no sign that anything was happening although Winston insisted on staying till three thirty, talking about the past, and the Assembly was meeting at three.’

De Gaulle, as events turned out, had little to fear. He was voted head of government by a unanimous vote of the Assembly accompanied by a motion that ‘Charles de Gaulle a bien mérité de la patrie’, a rare honour in French history. This was, at least in theory, the crowning moment of his wartime achievements. It made the ensuing plunge into crisis all the more dramatic.

Two days later de Gaulle received Thorez and rejected his demands for ministerial posts. He, de Gaulle, was forming the government, not the Communist Party. Thorez then wrote and published a reply, saying that de Gaulle had insulted ‘le caractère national de notre parti et de sa politique’ and the memory of their ‘75,000’ martyrs. (As Galtier-Boissière put it, out of the 29,000 French men and women executed during the Occupation, 75,000 had been Communist.)

The following day, 16 November, de Gaulle encouraged a rumour that he was about to resign. But this exercise in brinkmanship had not been thought through: he was painting himself into a corner. He broadcast a speech on 17 November, saying that he would not entrust the Ministry of the Interior to a Communist and give them control over security matters, nor would he trust them with foreign policy, nor with the armed forces. Senior officials were dismayed by this pointless provocation.

Two days later François Mauriac, in Le Figaro, emphasized that without de Gaulle at the head of government, France would fall under the influence either of the Anglo-Saxons or of the Soviet Union. That same day, 19 November, Gaullist groups demonstrated on the Boulevard Raspail, chanting: ‘It’s de Gaulle we need! Down with Thorez!’ The Palais Bourbon was sealed off by a cordon of troops and police set up roadblocks in many parts of Paris. The Communist Party, on the other hand, as Luizet reported to the Minister of the Interior, had evidently ordered its members to be very discreet.

Behind the military cordon, the general drift of the debate in the National Assembly went against de Gaulle. Despite expressions of admiration for the General, the message was clear. He had to accept a more or less equal division of ministerial posts between the three major parties.

That night, a depressed Gaston Palewski dropped in at the British Embassy. Everything, he thought, would be over in two days. Duff Cooper asked whether it really would be so dangerous to let the Communists have the Ministry of War for six months. Palewski was certain that they would turn the army round and stage a coup d’état.

Talk of coups d’état became infectious. A rumour ran round the next morning that de Gaulle, not the Communists, was planning to seize power with the backing of the army. The Communists restricted themselves to a vigorous complaint at de Gaulle’s refusal to make one of their members Minister of War. The party warned that de Gaulle should not ‘consider us as second-rate Frenchmen’. It had nominated General Joinville, an officer promoted from the FFI, as its candidate. Joinville, a well-known Communist sympathizer,