Memory and Power in Post-War Europe: Studies in the Presence of ...

62 Robert Gildea
greatness’. 4 He also refused to see Roosevelt on the latter’s way home
from Yalta, later telling journalists that this would have been tantamount
to approving decisions taken in his absence. 5 However, he was not the
only Frenchman to resent American highhandedness. Instructed to evacuate
Strasbourg, it was the comander of the French First Army, General
de Lattre de Tassigny, who told Eisenhower that ‘Strasbourg is a symbol
of the resistance and greatness of France ...Its abandonment would
cause the French to doubt in victory, and would have world-wide repercussions
...military honour and the prestige of the Allied armies are at
stake’. 6 Communists and left-wing Catholics attacked the presence of
American forces in France. Graffiti such as ‘Yankees go home’ graced
city walls, while in 1952 the arrival to take command of NATO forces
of General Ridgway, who was said to have used biological weapons in
the Korean war, provoked riots. Lastly, it was felt that price of American
aid was the penetration of French markets by American products, from
Hollywood films to Coca-Cola. Communists attacked ‘Coca-colonisation’
and French drink interests went to the courts in a vain attempt to have
the drink banned on health grounds. 7
Anti-Americanism vied with pro-Americanism among the French
public, but after 1958 de Gaulle was in charge of foreign policy and was
also equipped to impose the myths that sustained it. The core of his policy
was that France must have an independent foreign policy and independent
nuclear deterrent in order to hold its own against the superpowers,
especially the United States. ‘Having lived through great dramas over long
centuries’, he said in 1961, ‘France knows that her army must be hers
alone and that no other army will be secure.’ 8 In 1964 he refused to attend
the twentieth anniversary of the landings in Normandy, rehearsing all the
old arguments about the American preference for Vichy, the AMGOT
and the exclusion of French forces from D-Day. ‘You want me to go and
commemorate their landing’, he asked his advisers, ‘when it was the prelude
to a second occupation of the country?No, don’t count on me.’ 9 As a
result, US president Lyndon Johnson and Harold Wilson, the UK prime
4 Charles de Gaulle, Mémoires de Guerre II. Le salut, 1944–1946 (Paris: Plon, 1959), 390.
5 Charles de Gaulle, press conference 12 Nov. 1947, in Discours et Messages II. 1946–1958
(Paris: Plon, 1970), 158.
6 General Jean de Lattre de Tassigny to General Dwight Eisenhower, via General Devers,
2 Jan. 1945, in his Histoire de la Première Armée Française, Rhin et Danube (Paris: Plon,
1949), 349–50.
7 Richard Kuisel, Seducing the French. The Dilemma of Americanization (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1993), 48–9, 52–69.
8 Charles de Gaulle, Strasbourg speech of 23 Nov. 1961, in Discours et Messages III. 1958–
1962 (Paris: Plon, 1970), 368. This was quoted with approval by Michel Debré in
Gouverner: 1958–1962 (Paris: Albin Michel, 1988), 374.
9 Alain Peyrefitte, C’était de Gaulle II (Paris: Fayard, 1997), 85.