The Fifth Republic
As the incredible returns continued to pour in last week from the outer precincts of French power, the sweep of Charles de Gaulle's triumph increased. In Martinique in the Caribbean the ratio was 14-1 for De Gaulle. On the Pacific island of New Caledonia, 52-1. In the Sahara, 70-1. Of 18 overseas territories, only French Guinea voted no. French residents in the Soviet Union plumped for De Gaulle 74-43, and in the New York voting area, 2,343 to 152. France itself, in a record turnout, jammed the polling places to roll up a majority of 79.25% for the new Gaullist constitution.
No other leader of a Western democracy could point to so overwhelming a mandate. It freed De Gaulle of the need to depend on any unwieldy combination of quarreling political parties in forging his Fifth Republic. Much more important, to a man so stiff-necked about legality, he need no longer regard himself as the creation of the disgruntled cabal of paratroopers and Algerian settlers who last May provided the fuel that blew up the Fourth Republic. The mandate was his own. His power was legitimate.
Having voted power to De Gaulle, France relaxed under blue skies and in gentle fall weather. At Longchamps the crowds were out for the running of the race of the year, the 40 million-franc Prix de l'Arc de Triomphe. Men in morning coats and grey cravats walked amid the drift of chestnut leaves with elegant women in Balenciaga and Dior gowns and outsize souffle hats. A few miles across town in the cavernous glass-roofed Grand Palais, thousands of other Frenchmen thronged the annual Salon de l'Auto to stare with passionate absorption at the chromium flash and gadgets of the 1959 model cars. These people, the acquisitive bourgeois society described so memorably by Balzac, were the true victors of the referendum. France had voted conservative--matching the trend in every major Western European nation today.
Everyone but the Communists and a few chronic dissidents had voted yes for De Gaulle. Yet it also seemed clear that the voters of France and of the overseas territories--now known as the Community, like Britain's Commonwealth--had gone to the polls not so much to vote in a new constitution as to vote out an old. What united Frenchmen as dissimilar as Hubert Beuve-Mery, neutralist publisher of Le Monde, and the royalist pretender, the Comte de Paris, Prince Napoleon and Brigitte Bardot, cloistered Carmelite nuns and a nameless million voters who had previously backed the Communists, was an intense desire to be rid of the ungoverned and ungovernable past. It was a vote against twelve years of muddle, against 25 governments that had fallen one by one, against the "system" that De Gaulle once called the "trade union of place holders." It was, above all, a vote of confidence in Charles de Gaulle himself--for the soldier son of a professor of philosophy, for the youisg general who had taken a chance in 1940 and personified France in the councils of the Allies, for a man who wrote in the style of the great Augustans, had style in his own person, and had the courage to quit the political arena in 1946 when it seemed to him dishonorable to continue.
De Gaulle triumphed on his own conditions. It is doubtful if one voter in a thousand bothered to ponder the new constitution's 92 articles (see box). Even if they listened attentively to De Gaulle's oracular and stylishly ambiguous speeches, they got little hint of what the future would be like. Not even his aides, dedicated as they are to his general philosophy, are allowed to know at any moment the pattern of his intentions. All that most Frenchmen have for certain this week is a memory of De Gaulle moving among masses of people with the awkward lope of a giraffe, patting a head here, shaking a hand there, peering about him with nearsighted benevolence. But they knew also that he was a man of integrity and vision, and that nothing less would suffice now.
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