TO SURVIVE DE GAULLE
stead of demanding submission to de Gaulle, facilitated the creation of a
successor government by joining a tripartite coalition with the Communist
Party and the Socialist Party. MRP leaders explained that were they to
refuse participation, the Communists might well seize control of the execu-
tive. Unconvinced and embittered, de Gaulle dismissed the MRP leaders
as unfaithful allies, either inspired by narrow partisan ambitions or, at best,
weak men trapped already by “the system.” The breech widened when
MRP leaders supported the second draft constitution in the referendum of
October, 1946 — despite de Gaulle’s strong opposition — and again in
the spring of 1947, when the party forbade its members and officeholders
from taking joint membership in de Gaulle's newly formed Rassemblement
du Peuple Français (RPF).
Persuaded that the princes of the new régime des partis would never
effect from within those reforms necessary to restore French political unity
and authority, de Gaulle determined in the spring of 1947 to create a broad
new political organization, the RPF, whose specific mission would be to
reform the French state. As its name implied, the RPF was intended not to
to be simply another party, adding further to the political divisions of an
already divided nation. It was intended to bring together men of various
parties in a common effort for political reform. The device of “double
membership” proved ineffective, however, as Socialists and Popular Re-
publicans were forbidden by their parties to affiliate, and many of those
Radicals and Moderates who were eager to restore with the Gaullist label
their prestige lost in the war quickly balked when asked also to accept
Gaullist discipline.7 A strong Gaullist vote of almost 40 percent in the
municipal elections of 1947 faded to 23 percent and 120 Assembly seats
in the legislative elections of June, 1951. Within two years thereafter, de
Gaulle had disassociated himself from his deputies. With few exceptions,
designed to split the opposition, the General had determined that there
should be no collaboration with other parties until the constitution had been
revised. As power within the National Assembly shifted to the Right, how-
ever— and especially when Antoine Pinay became Prime Minister in 1952
— the temptation to play the parliamentary game proved irresistible to
many on the RFP benches. Again de Gaulle felt himself betrayed — this
time by deputies who rode to office on his own good name.
When crumbling political authority at home and a full scale revolt in
Algeria forced the National Assembly to recall de Gaulle in June, 1958,
he was understandably reluctant to tie his fate to another Gaullist party.
The Union pour la Nouvelle République was the creation of Gaullists, but
not of de Gaulle, who before the elections of November, 1958, forbade any
party from using his name, even as an adjective. Only when he became fear-
ful of being crippled by a hostile parliamentary majority in the elections of