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

70 Robert Gildea
themselves and their pasts. 30 The Gaullists too were divided, with Alain
Juppé arguing that the Maastricht Treaty was in the direct tradition of
Robert Schuman, while Philippe Séguin led the charge against Maastricht
by wheeling out the old argument that under the Declaration
of Rights and the Constitution of 1958 national sovereignty belonged to
the people and could not be alienated. He argued that from the
Hundred Years War to the battle of Valmy in 1792 national sovereignty
had been secured by national independence, and that national identity
itself was at stake: the treaty would leave the French ‘our cheeses and a
few of our customs ...perhaps the Marseillaise too on condition that we
change the words’. 31 Gaullists in the one camp argued that the General
would have supported the treaty, Gaullists in the other asserted that
he would have attacked it. Jacques Chirac, speaking near Strasbourg,
declared that ‘Maastricht is the prolongation of a policy endorsed by
General de Gaulle’. 32 Michel Debré père, campaigning against Maastricht
as he had once campaigned against the EDC, attempted to force the issue
by framing it in terms of collaboration and resistance: ‘Laval would have
said yes to the Maastricht agreement’, he asserted, ‘de Gaulle would have
said no’. 33 In the game of historical leapfrog, however, few could match
the confidence of one poster in Paris which announced, ‘Napoleon would
have voted for Maastricht’. 34
France and empire
In the years after the Second World War France, like other west European
countries, was absorbed by the debate about whether to retain or to give
up her empire. Given the paralysis of state power during the war France
in fact had to regain its empire in 1945 before it could decide what to
do with it. The policy issue was shaped by and helped to shape two
rival myths: one of France’s vocation of greatness, of which the empire
was both an expression and a guarantee, the other of France’s liberating
mission, as defined in the constitution of 1791, essentially repeated in
that of 1946, that ‘the French nation renounces the undertaking of war
with a view to conquest, and will never use its strength against the liberty
30 Le Monde, 8 May 1992. For fuller arguments see his France-Allemagne: Parlons franc
(Paris: Plon, 1996).
31 Journal Officiel, Assemblée Nationale, 5 May 1992, 863–78. His speech was published
separately as Discours pour la France (Paris: Grasset, 1992).
32 Le Monde, 9 Sept. 1992.
33 Michel Debré, Combattre toujours, 1969–1993 (Paris: Albin Michel, 1994), 175–6, 221.
34 Robert Gildea, The Past in French History (New Haven and London: Yale University
Press, 1994), 110.