De Gaulle and Europe

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De Gaulle and Europe is a very complicated issue. There’s one strand of thinking that sees de Gaulle as an uncommitted European because his vision of Europe was very different from that of the founders of the European Community, very different certainly from the federalist supranational vision of Jean Monnet.

De Gaulle knew Jean Monnet from the period of the Second World War. They didn’t always get on well because Monnet had gone to America rather than staying with de Gaulle in London. In October 1943, they had a rather extraordinary conversation in Algiers, where Monnet, who so many people see as a visionary in the founding of what is now the European Community, was sketching out the idea of a kind of common Europe built around Franco-German reconciliation, with a supranational element. De Gaulle was extremely sceptical, but it’s interesting that as early as October 1943, that discussion is engaged.

Suspicious of supranational institutions

De Gaulle was very suspicious of the idea of supranational institutions such as the Treaty of Rome or the European Defence Community (EDC). The EDC was an attempt in the 1950s to set up a European army – it’s very complicated, but to simplify, let’s call it that – a kind of pooling of the military resources of different European countries into some kind of European army. It was a way of solving the problem of Germany.

Now, de Gaulle was absolutely fundamentally opposed to the EDC, and his supporters in parliament in the 1950s helped to sabotage it. He wouldn’t have supported or he certainly wouldn’t have promoted the European Coal and Steel Community, which is the core of what becomes Europe. He was out of power when the Treaty of Rome was signed. So, all those sides of Europe were not de Gaulle’s Europe.

De Gaulle, the pragmatist

The first point to make is that when de Gaulle came back to power in 1958, the Treaty of Rome had just been signed. It was there. A lot of civil servants were wondering, ‘Is he going to accept it, is he not going to accept it?’, ‘Is he going to withdraw?’ And he accepts it. He says, ‘It is signed’, so we will now carry out the first measures to make the Treaty of Rome work – the first tariff reductions, on a country which really lived behind tariff walls. It was quite a brave decision at a particularly difficult financial economic moment. That’s de Gaulle saying, we’ve signed the Treaty of Rome, we’re going to make it work. And not only make it work, we’re going to get everything we can out of it.

We find in the 1960s that France argues vigorously for a common agricultural policy and uses the European Commission to leverage influence. That is de Gaulle’s pragmatic side. He wouldn’t necessarily have signed those treaties, he didn’t necessarily believe in those institutions, but he would work with them and get what France could out of them.

De Gaulle’s vision of Europe

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However, his own personal vision of Europe was very different. It was sometimes summarised in a phrase that he refused the authorship of – I don’t actually think he ever said it – l’Europe des patries, Europe of fatherlands. Still, it does basically summarise his vision of a political Europe: a Europe where there would be cooperation without loss of sovereignty between European political leaders. He wanted a kind of Concert of Europe, a slightly 19th century idea, so that Europe could have a political voice in the world.

Now, that really comes to him after the Second World War. He doesn’t really think about Europe before 1940, but he’s aware that if France is to count again in the world, the only way is through Europe. France can’t really make it between the two blocs, the Soviet bloc and the Atlantic bloc, without leveraging for herself greater influence. His way of leveraging that influence was through a political Europe.

Trying to build a political Europe

When de Gaulle comes back to power in 1958, he tries to seduce European political leaders into increasing political cooperation between them. One of the key moments is the Fouchet Plan in 1961. Now, that doesn’t actually work. Why? Because the other strand to de Gaulle’s view was that this political Europe must stand between the two blocs and not be dependent on the Atlantic bloc. He was requiring, in a sense, a distancing – not a rupture – with America. People exaggerate his alleged anti-Americanism, but certainly, he wanted an assertion of an independent voice for Europe. A European personality, as he put it; he was a great maker of phrases.

Concretely, what that meant was political action and, down the line, certainly the vision was for a common European defence policy: not like the one that he vetoed in the 1950s, but one which would be sovereign nations acting together. Of course, the key element there is that France is the only one of those countries that has an independent nuclear deterrent. One of the legacies of de Gaulle that we sometimes forget, because it’s so much part of the landscape of France today that we just take it for granted, is the decision that he made in 1958 for France to have an independent nuclear deterrent.

Towards a multipolar world

De Gaulle’s idea was that France would become the central mover of that political Europe because only France would have nuclear weapons. What he was trying to do was to leverage a role for France in the world through Europe, but at the same time, trying to develop a Europe that could speak independently of the two blocs.

In the 1960s, he’s obsessed with escaping from what he saw as the way in which the Cold War had frozen the international order – and de Gaulle hated to be frozen. He was obsessed with movements and change. What he wanted Europe to be was a third voice. He was looking towards a multipolar, not a bipolar, world, and Europe was going to be the way of leveraging that.

He was a European, but a European of a very different kind from the European federalists. I cannot imagine de Gaulle, for example, having signed up to the Maastricht Treaty. Sometimes people try to make historians say what their subjects would do today, and I cannot believe it. It seems to me the most inconceivable idea that de Gaulle could have signed up to that pooling of sovereignty.

Independence and sovereignty

One of de Gaulle’s key words when he was talking about France’s relationship with Europe, and indeed with the world, was “independence”. A country that is not independent cannot count. The other word was “sovereignty”. He was very suspicious of the idea of infringements of sovereignty, of pooling of sovereignty and so on. For him, he’s haunted forever by the 1930s, when France found herself so dependent on the British. Sovereignty is key for de Gaulle.

One of his problems with the way that the European Union was developing, or with the idea of an increasingly supranational Europe, was not only that diluted sovereignty would allow American influence, but that people would not be able to develop an affective relationship with something so nebulous, as it were, as the Europe that was being built.

Distance between us and them

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One of the crises of Europe today does come from a sense, in many countries, that there is an unaccountable Brussels bureaucracy. A lot of this is exaggerated, but it is not completely exaggerated. Although there are European Parliamentary elections, that sense of distance between us and them is very fundamental.

De Gaulle, I think, did have an intuition. When he was trying to set up his political Europe in 1961, 1962, he even later said we might have pan-European referenda. That never actually developed because the whole idea of political Europe didn’t happen, but de Gaulle was aware that people need to have a bond. I called it an affective relationship; one could call it an emotional relationship. He was aware that if they didn’t, dysfunction would ensue because people have to believe that the people who are talking for them or imposing rules on them are accountable to them.

Discover more about

De Gaulle and Europe

Jackson, J. (Ed.). (2002). Europe 1900–1945. Oxford University Press.

Jackson, J. (2001). France: The Dark Years, 1940–1944. Oxford University Press.

de Gaulle's thinking on Europe and France's sovereignty