The Fouchet Plan De Gaulle’s Intergovernmental Design for Europe

The Fouchet Plan
political integration on any serious scale, just as they may have exaggerated the
strength of de Gaulle to use parallel diplomacy to build a structure beyond their
eventual control.
Early Gaullist thinking
‘France cannot be France without greatness’, de Gaulle had written in 1954 on
the first page of his memoirs. 6 Greatness implied a France ‘sovereign,
independent and free’, as he declared in the same year, explaining his
opposition to the European Defence Community (EDC), which the 120 Gaullist
deputies at that time played a central role in defeating on the floor of the French
National Assembly. 7 The EDC envisaged a supranational defence structure for
Europe, placed at the disposal of NATO, in which common armed forces would
be managed by commissioners reporting to a directly-elected assembly, and
subject to the decision-making, both unanimous and by majority vote, of
national ministers. Virtually all these features of the EDC were unacceptable to
the General. To Gaullism, interdependence could only be admissible on French
terms.
6 Charles de Gaulle, Mémoires de guerre: L’Appel 1940-1942 (Plon, Paris, 1954) p1.
7 The European Defence Community (EDC) had been approved, in the original form of the Pleven
Plan (named after then French prime minister, René Pleven), by 348 votes to 224 by the National
Assembly in October 1950. The EDC Treaty was duly signed in May 1952, under the premiership
of conservative Antoine Pinay. By August 1954, however, when the final vote took place on
ratification of the treaty, it was rejected by 319 votes to 264 (in a procedural division). This defeat
was a result of several factors: the growing strength of Gaullists in the National Assembly
(following the June 1951 general election) matched by the continued hostility to the EDC of the
Communists; the increasing division of Socialists (by now out of government) and Radicals on
Europe; the increasing ambitiousness of the European project, with the parallel drafting of plans
for a parallel European Political Community (EPC); the rising tide of popular discontent with
French humiliation abroad (in May 1954 Diên Biên Phu had fallen, the Tunisian crisis was sapping
French confidence, and the Algerian war was imminent); and the refusal of Radical prime minister
Pierre Mendès-France to make ratification of the treaty a matter of confidence for the survival of
his two-month old government.
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