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The statesmen who did have cause for self-satisfaction in 1958 were nearly all new men—relative unknowns who had ridden a wave of discontent into power. Most of them were generals—Lebanon's Chehab, Iraq's Kassem, Burma's Ne Win, Pakistan's Ayub Khan, the Sudan's Abboud. And most seemed to have no program beyond the military man's urge to tidy up the frequently corrupt, frequently ineffectual parliamentary systems of young nations.
Few were the world's leaders able to turn to positive ends the explosive desire for change that stalked the earth in 1958. One who did was himself among the world's growing group of soldier-trained leaders. By putting his personal mark on great events and proving once again the fundamental Christian proposition that history is shaped by individuals, not by blind fate or inexorable Marxist laws, France's Charles Andre Joseph Marie de Gaulle, 68, made himself the Man of the Year.
Carrots & Cops. Eight months ago Charles de Gaulle, soldier, scholar and writer, was a recluse, regarded by most of the world—when it thought of him at all—as a man whose role in history had ended a dozen years earlier. Today he is Premier and President-elect of France's Fifth Republic and exercises more direct power over his country's affairs than any other democratically chosen leader in the Western world. "His personal prestige," says a British expert on France, "is higher than that of any Frenchman since Napoleon."
When De Gaulle emerged from the somnolent village of Colombey-les-deux-Eglises last May, France was sliding hopelessly into civil war. "The carrots are cooked, the carrots are cooked," blared Radio Algiers, repeating with monotonous insistence the code phrase which signified that the rebellious generals of Algeria were ready to land their paratroops in Metropolitan France. In Paris white-faced ministers of the Fourth Republic nervously deployed a small army of steel-helmeted cops, not sure of their loyalty, and Interior Minister Jules Moch ordered coils of barbed wire laid out on 15 of the 18 airfields surrounding Paris. Escorting a visitor out of his office, ex-Premier Guy Mollet, onetime Socialist Resistance leader, soberly remarked: "We may never see each other again. I am going to die on the barricades."
Today, those three ominous weeks in May seem a world away; if they did not justify the worst of fears, it was because all Frenchmen knew that they had a man to fall back on. Charles de Gaulle, with the spontaneous support of his countrymen, has restored the supremacy of internal law and given France a new constitution that for the first time in 88 years endows the executive branch with enough authority to pursue coherent policies. He has all but destroyed the Communist Party as an active factor in French government, has laid the groundwork for a fruitful new relationship between France and her onetime African colonies, and has immensely strengthened France's moral and psychological position in revolt-torn Algeria. Above all, he has given Frenchmen back their pride, swept away the miasma of self-contempt that has hung over France since its ignominious capitulation to Hitler in 1940.