Charles de Gaulle liked to believe that all Frenchmen at heart were Gaullists, ready to respond instantly to his mystic brand of nationalism in times of travail—provided, of course, that the call to glory came from an inspired and iron-willed leader. Last week a generally disgruntled French populace awoke to the clarion of a familiar bugle, and lo, it was playing their song.
The man with the horn was not that elegantly patrician occupant of the Elysee Palace, President Valery Giscard d'Estaing (who is, after all, not even a Guallist, but a member of the small Independent Republican Party). The bugler was the impatient, youngish Guallist, Jacques Chirac, who only 3% months ago angrily quit as Premier because he felt that Giscard had failed to halt the march of the left in France. Now Chirac was issuing a call to arms that would have pleased De Gaulle: he announced the grand reformation of the moribund Guallist party, formed his battalions and declared war on the left. In so doing, he challenged Giscard for the leadership of the governing majority.
The great pronouncement was revealed in the form of the consecration of Chirac himself as the new strongman of Gaullism, and it was celebrated at a masterfully staged political extravaganza. The name of the old party, U.D.R. (Union des Démocrates pour la République), was changed to the Assembly for the Republic (Rassemblement pour la République).* Seventy thousand Guallist supporters—the biggest political convention ever—were brought to Paris' Porte de Versailles exhibition hall by ten special trains, 300 buses and charter flights from all over the country. It was an excited, happy crowd of all ages, of men and women, many wearing tri-color emblems or buttons that read: CHIRAC, I BELIEVE IN HIM (Chirac, J'Y Crois). Drawn by the old French hunger for strong chieftains, they had come more for the man himself than for the party. Said a truck driver, beaming: "If we are called, it's because we are needed." An old farmer remembered: "We stopped the Reds in 1924 this way."
Shee-Rack! Climaxing a day-long orgy of pride and peroration, Chirac stood atop an immense podium, his arms outstretched in the large V popularized by De Gaulle. "Let us restore hope to our country!" he shouted to the throng. Like tiny flashes of lightning, the reflections of strobe lights glittered on his large glasses while his followers cried over and over, "Shee-rack! Shee-rack!"
There was a sense of political irony as well as holy resurrection. Two and a half years ago, in an act of brutal pragmatism, Chirac rejected his own party's Guallist candidate, Jacques Chaban-Delmas, in the French presidential elections and threw his support to Giscard, the more likely winner. Now Chirac was promising to lead the Gaullists out of the wilderness, to save France from the man he had helped elect.