With de Gaulle's departure, both France and Europe turned out to be completely dependent on the United States.
If France had not had de Gaulle, it would have become a minor European power already in 1940. But was it only charisma and unbending will that allowed this man to become the last paladin of the former Europe?
The quietly forgotten story with the Mistrals has become a kind of watershed. It did not so much change the relations between Russia and France at the military-technical cooperation level as turned the invisible page of the Fifth Republic's existence, because from now on the language will not turn to call its citizens the descendants of the stern Clovis, the selfless Jeanne d'Arc or the fearless d'Artagnan. Before us is a new formation that associates itself with the magazine Charlie Hebdo, which specializes in the humiliation of other people's shrines.
If we recall the terminology of Lev Gumilyov, then, undoubtedly, the French are now in a state of obscuration, that is, deep ethnic old age. At the same time, they look like a very elderly person who, despite the whole bouquet of age-related ailments, does not at all seek to give up bad habits. This is evidenced by the demographic policy of the country with the connivance of same-sex marriages and the destruction of the main criterion of the nation's viability - a full-fledged Christian family, and the inability to curb the hordes of migrants flooding France.
Against the background of all these sad events concerning, in general, the Old World as a whole, I recall the figure of the last paladin of a single, independent from the American dictatorship of Europe, a politician desperately and, as history has shown, unsuccessfully trying to revive the spiritually dying Motherland - Brigadier General Charles de Gaulle.
His efforts to save the Old World and the prestige of his own country were truly heroic; it was not for nothing that Churchill called de Gaulle "the honor of France." The general - by the way, in this rank he was never approved - succeeded in the impossible: not only to revive the country as a great power, but also to introduce it among the victors in World War II. Although she did not deserve this, breaking down at the first and by no means catastrophic failures at the front. When American troops landed in North Africa controlled by the pro-fascist Vichy regime, they were surprised to find in most local houses portraits of the traitor to France, Marshal Petain, and, in addition, faced resistance from the Vichy troops. And during the war years, French industry regularly worked for Germany.
Finally, according to the Soviet demographer Boris Urlanis, the losses of the Resistance amounted to 20 thousand people out of 40 million of the population, and the French units fighting on the side of the Wehrmacht lost from forty to fifty thousand killed, mainly in the ranks of the SS Charlemagne volunteer divisions. How not to recall the legend about the reaction of Field Marshal Keitel, who saw the French delegation when signing the act of unconditional surrender of Germany: “How! We also lost the war with this? Even if the Hitlerite commander did not say it aloud, he really thought for sure. If anyone held the fourth place among the victorious countries, it was flighty, but heroic Poland or courageous Yugoslavia, but not France.
But the latter had de Gaulle, while the Poles did not have a figure of this magnitude after the death of Sikorsky. Tito, however, did not find a place in Potsdam for many reasons, one of which - two communist leaders for the leaders of the United States and Great Britain was already too much.
Formation of personality
De Gaulle was born in 1890, twenty years after the defeat of the army of Napoleon III by the Prussian troops and the proclamation in Versailles - the palace of the French kings of the Second Reich. The fear of a second German invasion was the nightmare of the inhabitants of the Third Republic. Let me remind you that in 1874 Bismarck wanted to finish off France and only the intervention of Alexander II saved her from the final defeat. A little distracted, I will note: another 40 years will pass and Russia, at the cost of the death of its two armies in East Prussia, will again save France from inevitable defeat.
Then, in the last quarter of the 19th century, a thirst for revenge reigned among the French military and part of the intelligentsia. The de Gaulle family shared a similar sentiment. The father of the future president, Henri, who was wounded near Paris in 1870, told his son a lot about that unhappy war. He was not a professional military man, but served France as a teacher of literature and philosophy at the Jesuit college. It was he who served. And he passed on his inner state to his son, who graduated from the same college in which his father taught.
This is a very important detail on de Gaulle's life path. For the solid Christian upbringing and education he received, the foundation of which was the motto in the spirit of medieval Christian chivalry, to which, by the way, the de Gaulle family belonged: "Throne, altar, saber and sprinkler", in the future will make the general not just a supporter of the creation of a strong Europe, but also without exaggeration as a defender of Christian civilization and its values, which have been forgotten by the modern leadership of the country.
It was with a saber in his hands that young Charles decided to devote his earthly life to France, enrolling in Saint-Cyr, an elite military educational institution created by Napoleon, in which, first of all, noblemen who came from old knightly families and brought up in the spirit of Christian piety and devotion to the Motherland studied.
Unofficially, Saint-Cyr was under the patronage of the Jesuits and was, in a sense, an island of old France. It is symbolic that the school was by no means destroyed by the Nazis, but by American aviation: this is how the United States, deprived of its historical roots, willy-nilly destroyed Christian Europe.
Two years before the start of the First World War, de Gaulle was released from school, outside the gates of which he was met by a far from the France that he dreamed of. At the beginning of the century, three thousand religious schools were closed, and the Church was separated from the state, which was a blow to the spiritual and moral education and upbringing of the French. A targeted blow, for a number of Prime Ministers of the Third Republic - Gambetta, Ferry, Combes - were Masons. De Gaulle felt the consequences of their fatal education policy for the country years later, when he became president.
But this is in the future, but for now the young captain found himself in the flames of the First World War, where he was awaited by three wounds, captivity and six unsuccessful escapes, as well as the experience of the war with the Bolsheviks as part of the Polish army, in the ranks of which he could make a brilliant career. If this happened and - who knows - Poland, perhaps, would have avoided defeat in the Second World War.
This is not speculation, refuted by the indisputable "history does not tolerate the subjunctive mood." It's time to touch on another facet of de Gaulle's personality - his intuition. While still in college, the future general was carried away by the teachings of Bergson, who placed intuition at the forefront of human existence, which was expressed for a politician in anticipation of future events. This was also characteristic of de Gaulle.
Feather and sword
Returning home after the Versailles Peace, he realized: the lull for a short time and the most prudent for France now is to prepare for a new, completely different war. They tried not to think about it at all in the Third Republic. The French, as it seemed to them, had reliably fenced off from Germany by the Maginot Line and considered it sufficient.
It is not surprising that de Gaulle's first book, Discord in the Camp of the Enemy, published in 1924, remained unnoticed by either the military or the politicians. Although it outlined the experience of a person who saw Germany from the inside. And in fact, the work of a then young officer was the first step towards a closer study of the future enemy. It is important to note that de Gaulle appears here not only as a writer, but also as a politician.
Less than ten years later, his second book, already better known - "On the Edge of the Sword", came out. De Gaulle's intuition manifests itself in it. There is an opinion about the book of the English journalist Alexander Werth: "This essay reflects de Gaulle's unshakable faith in himself as a man sent down by fate."
Following, in 1934, came the work "For a professional army", and four years later - "France and its army." In all three books, de Gaulle writes about the need to develop armored forces. However, this appeal remained a voice crying in the wilderness, the leaders of the country rejected his ideas as contrary to the logic of history. And here, oddly enough, they were right: history has demonstrated the military weakness of France, despite all the power of her weapons.
It's not even about the government, but about the French themselves.
In this regard, an analogy is appropriate with the characteristic once given by the German historian Johann Herder to the Byzantine society of the late antiquity: “Here, of course, divinely inspired men - patriarchs, bishops, priests, made speeches, but to whom did they address their speeches, what did they talk about?.. Before the mad, spoiled, unrestrained crowd they had to explain the Kingdom of God … Oh, how I pity you, O Chrysostom."
In pre-war France, de Gaulle appeared in the guise of Chrysostom, and the crowd, unable to hear him, was the government of the Third Republic. And not only it, but society as a whole, which in the 1920s was aptly characterized by the prominent church hierarch Benjamin (Fedchenkov): “We must agree that population growth in France is decreasing more and more, because the country needs an influx of emigrants. The decline of agricultural farms was also pointed out: hard rural labor became unpleasant for the French. Easy, fun life in noisy cities pulls them from villages to centers; farms were sometimes abandoned. All this bore signs of the beginning of the weakening and degeneration of the people. It is not in vain that the French are often brought out in theaters bald. I personally also noted that they have a relatively higher percentage of bald people than the Germans, Americans or Russians, not to mention the negroes, where they are not at all."
A voice crying in Paris
In a word, in the pre-war years, de Gaulle resembled a stranger from another - a chivalrous era, who by some unknown means found himself in the world of well-fed elderly bald bourgeois who wanted only three things: peace, tranquility and entertainment. It is not surprising that when the Nazis occupied the Rhineland in 1936, France, as Churchill writes in his memoirs, "remained absolutely inert and paralyzed and thus irrevocably lost the last chance to stop Hitler, overwhelmed by ambitious aspirations, without a serious war." Two years later, in Munich, the Third Republic betrayed Czechoslovakia, in 1939 - Poland, and ten months later - itself, abandoning real resistance to the Wehrmacht and turning into a puppet of the Reich, and in 1942 - into its colony. And if it were not for the allies, the vast possessions of France in Africa would soon go to Germany, and in Indochina - to the Japanese.
Most of the French did not mind this state of affairs - food and entertainment remained. And if these words seem too harsh to someone, find photos on the Internet about the life of the majority of Parisians under the conditions of the German occupation. In the provinces, the situation was similar. General Denikin's wife recalled how they lived “under the Germans” in the south-west of France in the town of Mimizan. Once, English radio called on the French to commit an act of civil disobedience on their national holiday - Bastille Day: to go out in festive clothes to the streets, despite the ban. "Two Frenchmen" came out - she and her old husband-general.
Thus, in 1945, de Gaulle saved the honor of France against the wishes of the majority of its population. Spas and, as they say, went into the shadows, waiting in the wings, because intuition suggested so. And she did not disappoint: in 1958, the general returned to politics. By that time, the Fourth Republic had already suffered a defeat in Indochina, could not suppress the uprising in Algeria. In fact, the joint aggression with Israel and Britain against Egypt - Operation Musketeer - ended in collapse.
France was heading for disaster once again. This was stated directly by de Gaulle. He did not hide the fact that he had come to save her, like a selfless doctor trying to restore youth to a decrepit old man. From the very first steps as the head of the Fifth Republic, the general acted as a consistent opponent of the United States, which sought to turn the once great empire into a secondary country completely dependent on Washington. Undoubtedly, the efforts of the White House would have been crowned with success if de Gaulle had not stood in their way. As president, he made a titanic effort to revive France as one of the world's powers.
Confrontation with the United States logically followed from this. And de Gaulle went for it, unilaterally withdrew the country from the military component of NATO and expelled American troops from France, collected all the dollars in his homeland and took them overseas by plane, exchanging them for gold.
I didn't become a trader
I must say that the general had a reason not to love the States, since they had a hand in the above geopolitical failures of the Fourth Republic. Yes, Washington provided substantial military and technical assistance to the French troops in Indochina, but was concerned not about preserving the overseas possessions of Paris, but about strengthening its own positions in the region. And if the French won, Indochina would have been prepared for the fate of Greenland - formally a Danish colony, and the bases on its territory are American.
During the Algerian war, the Americans supplied weapons to neighboring Tunisia, from where they regularly fell into the hands of the rebels, and Paris could not do anything about it. Finally, it was the United States, along with the USSR, who demanded the termination of Operation Musketeer, and the position of the seemingly allied Washington became a slap in the face for Britain and France.
True, the dislike of the founder of the Fifth Republic towards the United States was caused not only and even not so much by a political factor, a clash of strategic interests, but was of a metaphysical nature. Indeed, for the true aristocrat of de Gaulle, the very essence of the once created by the Freemasons, from whom the general purposefully relieved France, of American civilization with its inherent spirit of trade and economic expansion, which absolutely did not accept the chivalrous attitude to life, politics and war, so dear to this person, was alien.
However, de Gaulle set himself quite pragmatic geopolitical tasks. According to compatriot General Philippe Moreau-Defarque, the founder of the Fifth Republic tried to "combine two usually opposite elements: on the one hand, adherence to geographical and historical realism, expressed in his time by Napoleon:" Each state pursues the policy that geography dictates to it … " On the other hand, de Gaulle believed that it was necessary “to regain the lost independence in a key area by creating nuclear deterrent forces, which should, in principle, independently guarantee the defense of the national territory, rationally manage their inheritance, and provide themselves with an amplifier of power, thanks to the creation of a European organization on the initiative of France will finally continue to pursue an independent foreign policy with no regard for anyone."
As an apologist for the Eurasian Union from the Atlantic to the Urals, as he himself expressed it, de Gaulle inevitably had to go for rapprochement with the USSR and West Germany, becoming in the field of geopolitics the ideological heir of the outstanding German thinker Haushofer. For it was in France's alliance with these states that the general saw the only possible way to create a strong Europe independent of the United States.
As for the president's domestic policy, it is enough to recall only one of his decisions: to grant independence to Algeria, which has found itself at the mercy of semi-criminal groups. Back in 1958, de Gaulle said: “The Arabs have a high birth rate. This means that if Algeria remains French, France will become Arab."
Even in a nightmare, the general could not have dreamed that his successors would do everything possible to make France flooded with uncultured people from North Africa, who hardly knew who, say, Ibn Rushd. During the reign of de Gaulle on October 17, 1961, five hundred French policemen defended the Parisians from a terrible pogrom, which émigrés gathered to arrange, a crowd of forty thousand and partly armed who took to the streets of the capital. They prefer not to remember the heroic deed of the police in Paris; on the contrary, they sympathize with the victims from the brutal crowd. What surprise, the French, for the most part nowadays "all Charlie …"
Alas, the ideas of the creator of the Fifth Republic to create a united Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals remained a dream. Every year France is turning more and more into an emigrant enclave, intellectually and culturally degrading. And in the field of foreign policy, it is becoming more and more dependent on the United States.
