RICE UNIVERSITY STUDIES
who identified with traditional parties, Charles de Gaulle might well have
chosen an above-party posture simply out of tactical considerations. In fact,
his aloofness from parties — including his own — was more deeply rooted.
From the fall of France in 1940 down to the present day, de Gaulle time
and again has expressed his contempt for the traditional parties — the
"partis de jadis’’ — whose “decadence,” whose attachment to selfish minor-
ity interests, whose divisiveness and quarrelsomeness, whose inability to
govern, whose reluctance to renounce the “sterile games” of the "régime
des partis,” undermined the solidarity, the stability, and the greatness of
the French nation, and, he argues, led directly to the fall of France in 1940
and again to the Algerian crisis of May, 1958.■'
In his famous Bayeux speech of Iune 16, 1946 (later adopted by the
UNR as one of its major doctrinal statements), de Gaulle seemed to accept
such parties as endemic to France: “In brief, the rivalry of parties in our
country takes on a fundamental character that sets everything adrift and
very often wrecks the superior interests of the country. This is an obvious
fact which is due to our national temperament, to the accidents of our
history, and to the disturbances of today, but which our institutions must
take into consideration in order to preserve the respect for law, the cohesion
of governments, the efficiency of administrations, and the prestige and au-
thority of the state.”4 The remedy, he argued, must be institutional and
must come from outside the party system. The executive must cease to be
“merely a delegate of his party”; he must be independent, powerful, and
capable of protecting the national interest against the onslaught of self-
interested elites both inside and outside the parties. As early as September,
1944, de Gaulle sensed the reservations, the private ambitions, of “‘poli-
ticians,’ new and old,” and concluded—in traditional Bonapartist fashion—
that “more than ever, then, I had to seek support from the French people
rather than from the ‘elite’ groups which tended to come between us.”5
For de Gaulle, apparently only the national leader, in mystic or plebisci-
tary contact with “the people,” is capable of perceiving and defending the
national interest.
De Gaulle rarely has seen fit to exempt even Gaullist parties from the
mistrusted category of “intermediary bodies.” Twice during the Fourth
Republic he placed hope in a political party and in both instances felt him-
self betrayed. As Premier of the provisional French government for eighteen
months following the liberation of France, de GauIle enjoyed strong and
consistent support from the newly organized Mouvement Républicain Pop-
ulaire (MRP), the French Christian Democratic Party, which in 1945
proudly declared itself to be the "parti de la fidélité” to de Gaulle∕∙ When
de Gaulle resigned in Ianuary, 1946, in protest over the reluctance of the
Socialist and Communist parties to follow his lead, however, the MRP, in-