(10 of 10)
The array of troubles before De Gaulle is indeed sobering. The country is basically prosperous, but its economy is restrictive. Politically, the new Assembly, calling itself Gaullist, is considerably more rightist in outlook than the general himself. Above all, the four-year-old Algerian Moslem revolt continues to drain France of $2,400,000 a day, and prospects for a negotiated end to the fighting, once considered high, were badly dashed last October, when the rebels angrily considered De Gaulle's soldier-to-soldier, "flag-of-truce" offer a humiliating proposal.
But such problems, the kind that reduced every leader of the Fourth Republic to fatalistic acceptance of eventual defeat, provide a kind of elation to a man of De Gaulle's temperament. "France," he wrote in his memoirs, "is not really herself unless in the front rank. Only vast enterprises are capable of counterbalancing the ferments of dispersal which are inherent in her people." As for himself, De Gaulle has never abandoned the position he took a quarter of a century ago: "Faced with crisis, the man of character falls back on himself. He imposes his own stamp on action, takes responsibility for it, makes it his own . . . Difficulty attracts the man of character because it is in embracing it that he realizes himself."
These were bold, proud words. But underlying them is the deepest of all De Gaulle's convictions: "Glory gives herself only to those who have always dreamed of her." In 1958, obedient to his maxim, glory gave herself to Charles de Gaulle.
* Though Volume 1 sold a mere 6,900 copies in the U.S.