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"Bitter Serenity." It was his own dream to preside as a powerful executive over a united France. He was foiled by France, the "most mercurial and intractable nation in the world." The "parties of yesteryear," as he dubbed them later, returned to their old, irresponsible ways. Rather than be embroiled in their machinations, De Gaulle resigned as President of France only two months after his election in 1946 and, retiring in "bitter serenity" to his country home outside Paris, wrote these memoirs.
"Every Frenchman, whatever his tendencies," De Gaulle concludes, "had the troubling suspicion that with the general vanished something primordial, permanent and necessary which he incarnated in history and which the regime of parties could not represent. But they knew it could be invoked by common consent as soon as a new laceration threatened the nation." Like so many of the general's grand pronouncements, it turned out to be a simple statement of fact. In 1958, on the brink of civil war, France did indeed turn again to the primordial force that is Charles de Gaulle.