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

Myth, memory and policy in France since 1945 63
minister, did not go, and former US president Dwight D. Eisenhower,
who had been supreme commander of the Allied forces in Western Europe
in the Second World War, and Viscount Montgomery, the British commander
who conducted the Normandy invasion, who were both due to
participate, withdrew.
The same resentments lay behind de Gaulle’s decision early in 1966
to withdraw from the military command structure of NATO and to require
American forces to leave French soil. Aghast at the decision, the
US ambassador, Charles Bohlen, sought out Michel Debré, then finance
minister, and asked him how the presence of American forces in 1918
and 1944 had infringed French independence. Debré replied that in 1918
the Allied armies were commanded by Marshal Foch while in 1944 ‘you
were the head, the soul and the strength of the coalition which delivered
and saved us, but the French people had to force General de Gaulle on
you, against your will, in order to avoid the AMGOT’. De Gaulle’s decision
in 1963 to veto the British request to join the Common Market
may also be explained by resentments going back to the Second World
War. When Harold Macmillan visited Rambouillet in December 1962
de Gaulle recalled the conversation he had had with Churchill on the
eve of D-Day, to the effect that Britain would always choose the United
States before Europe. 10 His description of Britain at the press conference
where he delivered the veto as ‘insular and maritime’ betrayed his
vision of the Common Market as none other than the Continental System
of Napoleon, a customs area serving French purposes and shutting out
Britain in order to asphyxiate it. The message was not lost on Macmillan,
who complained to President Kennedy that ‘De Gaulle is trying to dominate
Europe. His idea is not a partnership, but a Napoleonic or Louis XIV
hegemony’. 11 Georges Pompidou, who negotiated with Edward Heath
Britain’s entry into the Common Market in 1972, admitted that ‘England
could no longer put up with the Europe of Six, which must have reminded
her of Napoleonic Europe and the Continental Blockade’. 12
French presidents after de Gaulle and Pompidou were more aware of
the benefits of good relations with the United States. France remained
within the NATO alliance and during the presidency of Valéry Giscard
d’Estaing the United States began to help the French behind the scenes
with nuclear technology. The possession and control of an independent
nuclear deterrent underpinned the autonomy of French foreign policy
10 P. M. H. Bell, France and Britain, 1940–1994. The Long Separation (London and New
York: Longman, 1997), 196. See also Peyrefitte, who added, ‘Ce souvenir est indélébile’,
C’était de Gaulle, 84.
11 Harold Macmillan, At the End of the Day, 1961–1963 (London: Macmillan, 1973), 366.
12 Georges Pompidou, Entretiens et Discours, 1968–1974 (Paris: Plon, 1975), II, 127.