There was a traffic jam Tuesday on the small departmental 396. This charming Haute-Marne road which winds between freshly plowed fields is the one which connects Colombey-les-Deux-Églises to the A5 motorway arriving from Paris. This is where they all met. On this anniversary of his death, we lined up at the cemetery to honor the grave of General de Gaulle.
The fiftieth anniversary, however, was last year! But five months before the presidential election, the pilgrimage was appropriate. From the prime minister to the contenders for the candidacy of the right (LR), it was almost necessary to take a number to meditate in front of the cross of Lorraine. Even the socialist candidate, Anne Hidalgo, had made the trip, she whose party once called de Gaulle a “dictator”, after his return to power in 1958, the Communists had treated him as the reason of … fascist.
It just goes to show that we should not worry too much about these bird names which most of the time only express political ignorance and the lack of vocabulary of those who use them repeatedly. De Gaulle was not lacking in vocabulary. It was not the man of the tongue of wood.
Quebeckers are the first to know, they whom the General considered as a people worthy to aspire to independence, even if it means disrupting all uses. Quebec “has the makings of a sovereign nation; it has its cultural cohesion, ”he said.
There is something obscene in noting that, “on the left or on the right, all are now Gaullists”, whereas, “for fifty years, however, all have forgotten the lessons of the General”, wrote our colleague from the Figaro Christine Clerc. But de Gaulle was under no illusions. He even planned it: “one day, we will cling to our basques to save the country,” he said.
However, if he reappears, the father of the Trente Glorieuses would pass for a hideous conservative, not to say a character of the extreme right. First, by the way it is part of long history. We know this anecdote where, getting angry in front of a British ambassador, he told him: “I’ve been telling you this for a thousand years!” “To his faithful Alain Peyrefitte, de Gaulle did not hesitate to say that, if he came to Quebec, it was to” pay the debt of Louis XV “. Basically, the man of June 18 was familiar with the entire history of France, that of the Ancien Régime as well as that of the Revolution, “from the coronation of Reims to the feast of the Federation”, according to the consecrated phrase of the historian Marc Bloch.
Lover of literature, “haunted by France”, says Malraux, de Gaulle knew that civilizations go through the ages and that they exceed us all. This civilization was embodied above all in the French nation, which he defended step by step against the empires, regardless of whether they took the form of the German invasion, American control or demographic peril. Because de Gaulle was first and foremost attached to an identity, customs and culture.
Would he not have confided to Peyrefitte that, if he had cut the Algerian knot at the risk of his life, it was so that Colombey-les-Deux-Églises did not become “Colombey-les-deux-Mosques”? The math was simple. But it took the courage to draw the consequences. “I would like more babies to be born in France and less immigrants to come there,” he also confided in the ear of his Prime Minister, Georges Pompidou. Like René Lévesque who attacked the “Rhodesians of Westmount”, there is no doubt that, for this freedom of tone, de Gaulle would today be lynched on the Internet, condemned to social death and prosecuted in court.
Yet no one respected the people anymore. Solitary in the fight, often against his own compatriots, he was the only one to have the courage to consult them regularly by referendum and to give up his place as soon as he felt disowned. In short, quite the opposite of today, where politics too often consists of taking inspiration from the times by clinging to power. It is no coincidence that de Gaulle hated political parties.
Other times, other manners. Yesterday’s anti-fascists risked torture and death. They went into battle with a flower and a gun to defend their homeland. Those of today lynch their teachers on the Internet hidden behind pseudonyms or debunk statues without ever risking anything.
So wants it the new logic “progressive”, not to say consumerist, which every ten years pushes into the limbo of the reaction the ideas which it carried to the skies only yesterday. On the contrary, what we admire in de Gaulle is this fidelity to a few great ideas which uplift souls and last through time. What if he was the real modern?