FROM ENMITY TO ENTENTE

THOUGH he will be remembered as the senior architect of Franco-German amity, Charles de Gaulle has believed throughout most of his life that Frenchman and German could never bridge their temperamental differences--let alone lay foundations for Europe's closest economic, political and military entente. In 1934, while a captain attached to the Defense Ministry, De Gaulle wrote a slim volum, The Army of the Future, which mirrored the conviction of most Frenchmen that the traditional hostility between France and Germany was "in the nature of things." The border between the two countries, wrote De Gaulle, "is an open wound; the wind that sweeps it is laden with ulterior motives."

Logicians v. Carpet Knights. Psychologicall, De Gaulle elaborated, France and Germany were doomed to "a constant state of mutual distrust." And for what reason? In his rolling prose he apostrophized both peoples:

"This Frenchman, who has so much order in his mind and so little in his acts, this logician who doubts everything, this lackadaisical hard worker, this enthusiast for tail coats and public gardens who goes about in sloppy clothes and strews the grass with litter, in short, this fickle, uncertain, contradictory nation--how could the Teuton sympathize with it, understand it, or trust it?

"And conversely, we feel uneasy about Germany, a bundle of powerful yet hazy instincts, born artists without any taste, technicians who remain feudal, with restaurants which are temples, Gothic palaces for lavatories, oppressors who want to be loved, separatists who are slavishly obedient, carpet knights who make themselves sick when they have had too much beer."

The irony of De Gaulle's evolution is that it took yet another war with Germany to persuade him that German and Frenchman could and should be partners. In his memoirs. he describes the thoughts that filled his mind in 1945 while inspecting French occupation forces in Germany.

Modified Psychology. "Observing the mountains of ruins to which the cities were reduced, passing through flattened villages, receiving the supplications of despairing burgomasters, seeing populations from which male adults had almost entirely disappeared, made me, as a European, gasp in horror. I also observed that the cataclysm, having reached such a degree, would profoundly modify the psychology of the Germans.

"Amid the ruins, mourning and humiliation which had submerged Germany, I felt my sense of distrust and severity fade within me. I even glimpsed possibilities of understanding which the past had never offered. Moreover, it seemed to me that the same sentiment was dawning on our soldiers. The thirst for vengeance which had spurred them on at first had abated as they advanced across the ravaged earth. I saw them merciful before the misery of the vanquished."

Centuries of Bad Dreams. Later that same year, at Mainz, De Gaulle declared: "We proceed from the same race; we are Europeans, men of the West. How many reasons for us to stand by one another henceforward!" In another speech at Koblenz, he added: "Time will go by and wounds will be healed, but the wounds are deep and the healing time will be long." At a gala gathering in Freiburg, De Gaulle summed up his thoughts:

"I began wondering if so many battles fought and invasions endured for so many centuries were not merely bad dreams. How can I believe that the Germans ever entertained toward the Gauls anything but this cordiality of which I was being offered such striking proofs? But when I found myself again in the ruined streets amid a grief-stricken crowd, I could see what disaster this nation had had to endure in order to heed the counsels of reason at last."

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